Cinema: Dishonest Daydream

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BUTTERFLIES ARE FREE

Directed by MILTON KATSELAS

Screenplay by LEONARD GERSHE

The blind boy has only recently moved into the Haight-Ashbury district from a plush San Francisco suburb, where Mom smothered him with heaping portions of maternal concern. A guitarist and songwriter, he is anxious to make it on his own, maybe put together a nightclub act. Everyone is impressed with his songs and with his matter-of-fact courage about his handicap. "You're a beautiful person, inside and out," gushes the girl next door, who rapidly graduates to roommate status.

Leave it to Mom to bust up the match. She tells her son he can only get hurt, and brazens the girl into leaving because she's "not what Don needs." Neither, most emphatically, is Mom, who nevertheless turns out to be a real heroine. Realizing after all her conniving that it is time her boy became a man, she departs in a cloud of humility, leaving Don to fend for himself and perhaps convince his paramour to return.

As a play, Butterflies Are Free continues to enjoy a healthy run on Broadway. Its director, Milton Katselas, has mounted the movie version with commendable restraint. Goldie Hawn, as the girl next door, has come a long way from her giddy role in Laugh-In; she is often genuinely touching. Edward Albert, the son of Actor Eddie Albert, is creditable as the blind boy, and Eileen Heckart is appropriately hateful as the mother, although she is unable to be convincing in her transformation. But then nobody could be.

Both play and film are calculated pieces of commercialism. Writer Leonard Gershe is a salesman who works the territory of dishonest daydreams. He creates a subordinate character called Ralph, a scruffy, loud-mouthed director of experimental plays who sneers at the "tight-assed matrons" in suburbia who patronize the theater. He talks a lot about nudity on stage, about the need for the theater to deal with subjects like dope, and he is made to look the fool. If Gershe's idea of honesty is Butterflies Are Free, it is Ralph who deserves our support.