Cinema: Quick Cuts

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JIMI HENDRIX, a documentary eulogy to the late rock guitarist, includes a great deal of performance footage intercut with interviews: of groupies, of roadies, of family and friends and peers. The biography that emerges is perfunctory and predictable. There are all sorts of discussions about genius, talent, self-destruction and the miseries and pressures of a rock star's life, none of it new, most of it rather sweeping and vague. Hendrix's furious, kinetic music is at the core of the film, which at its best is like a "greatest hits" record album on film. The interview material is like liner notes, although not quite so easily ignored.

WESTWORLD was written by Michael Crichton, author of the novel from which The Andromeda Strain was adapted. Here, making his debut as a director, he provides mechanical film making to match his machine-tooled prose. He posits an amusement park for adults, run by computer technicians and scientists, where the customers pay plenty to live out their elaborate, generally adolescent fantasies. The hero (Richard Benjamin) dresses up as a cowboy and gets to spend a week in a replica of a Western town, where he becomes involved in saloon brawls, witnesses bank robberies, goes upstairs with the ladies who hang around the saloon, and gets stalked by a gunslinger in black (Yul

Brynner). Benjamin also gets to gun down Brynner on a couple of occasions, since Brynner, like all the residents of Westworld, is a robot. The automatons weary of the monotony and indignity of their life and rebel or, more properly, run amuck, as they are wont to do.

Though casually entertaining, the movie gives off the smug, unimaginative feeling of having itself been programmed by a computer.

THE DON is DEAD is a scurvy mob melo drama that nevertheless presents sever al new insights into the manners and morals of gangland. We note, for ex ample, that persons affiliated with the Mafia have a certain delicacy when referring to bathroom matters. "Can I use the powder room?" a sultry lady inquires of a beau. A bomber explains his eagerness to escape an impending explosion by gesturing toward the facilities, hopping up and down and muttering "Uhhmm . . . nature call." Further, it seems that the Mafia has taken matters of ecology straight to heart: corpses are deposited all neatly wrapped in plastic bags. Aside from these incidental social observations, the movie concerns Anthony Quinn, as a Mafia don, warring with rival factions over Angel Tompkins, an actress to whom all human emotions save narcissism seem alien. She represents the most unlikely cause for the outbreak of hostilities since the War of Jenkins's Ear.