Cinema: Raking Up the Autumn Leavings

Seven films for fall, from Bond to Beyond

STREAMERS

David Rabe's war play Streamers takes place in a kind of boot camp on the border of national psychosis. Here boredom sinks into despair; high spirits become hysterics; the killer instinct can flare with switchblade speed. Set in 1965, Streamers was written soon after the 1975 fall of Sai gon, and Rabe's dialogue glows with the white heat of hindsight. His four young draftees are doomed from the start, either by their blithe ignorance of the horror to come or by their premonition of it.

Though they never leave their Virginia Army base, they are treading blindly through a field of moral land mines.

Seven years later, through Director Robert Altman's camera eye, we can see that Streamers is only incidentally about Viet Nam. Men do not need a war to touch their heart of darkness, Rabe seems to suggest; the threat of human intimacy is provocation enough. Are they men like Billy (Matthew Modine), a fresh-faced lad with a college education? Or Richie (Mitchell Lichtenstein), an upper-class homosexual with a taste for taunt? Or Roger (David Alan Grier), a sweet-natured black who deflects each insult with a shrug? Or Carlyle (Michael Wright), the slum-bred black spoiling for a quick apocalypse? Doesn't matter. When the crisis comes, they will be as surprised as the paratrooper whose chute just wouldn't open.

Altman's principal actors won (and deserved) an ensemble award at last month's Venice Film Festival; but Wright's is the star presence here. He curls his lips around Carlyle's jive slurs until they are twisted into madhouse poetry. He glides through the barracks like a hipster on a death mission. Charlie Parker, meet Charlie Manson. Carlyle is the creepily irresistible spirit of all wars, hot and cold, global and interior, war without end, amen . — By Richard Corliss

NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN What's this? James Bond sipping parsley tea? Subjecting himself to herbal colonies? True, all too true, in Never Say Never Again. Since he is incarnated (actually, of course, reincarnated) by Sean Connery, now 53, the film's promising premise is that the free world's all-pro free safety has lost a step or two in his duel with the forces of evil, and requires a rehabilitating stay at a health spa before he can once again be licensed to kill in his formerly youthful and exuberant manner.

Not to worry though. He has scarcely settled into his uncomfortable regimen be fore he has bedded one of his therapists and received his first hints of the interna tional conspiracy that will preoccupy him for the rest of this loose-jointed remake of Thunderball. Once again, the scenario has something to do with the theft of nuclear warheads and their use as a blackmail weapon. The plot's mastermind is played with silky, neurotic charm by Klaus Maria Brandauer (so fine in Mephisto), while as his chief agent provocateur, Barbara Carrera deftly parodies all the fatal femmes who have slithered through Bond's career. And it is good to see Connery's grave stylishness in this role again. It makes Bond's cynicism and opportunism seem the product of genuine worldliness (and world weariness) as opposed to Roger Moore's mere twirpishness.