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Show Movie Review Mediocrity Ruins "Games" By STEVE DIMEO All that saves "Games" playing (the pun is lamentably lament-ably inevitable) through Tuesday at the Rialto and Fox Olympus drive-in is that it clearly never tries to be an exceptional picture. But even that much salvation is wasted. Nothing can save a corpse that's died a thousand times already. al-ready. The film tries to star Simone Signoret and Katherine Ross in an apparent effort to conceal James Caan's mediocrity. But nowhere does Miss Signoret have an opportunity to expose any of the talent that won her once an academy award. All she can demonstrate is that she is much older now and wiser only in the financially necessary sense of the word. As she says with what might be a strong hint of autobiography in the movie, "One must be practical in order to survive." Miss Ross only has a chance to prove that she hasn't had the additional misfortune of inheriting the plainness of her Aunt Katherine Hepburn's face. "Games" has, however, not fared as well. Regretfully, Re-gretfully, it has inherited too much from its archaic family. The movie could have easily been retitled "A Retelling of 'Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte,' 'Strait-jacket,' 'Strait-jacket,' et. all, But in Vivid Color" or "How to Try Reviving What Used to Be a Unique and Successful Formula for Explaining Away the Supernatural." Director Curtis Harrington is too obviously attempting attemp-ting only to tell the story that he once co-authored. It doesn't seem to bother him in the least bit that he sory has become tediously dull from excessive duplication. The game metaphors may be something of an effort ef-fort to transcend the tedium. "Most of our lives," one bit player says at one point, "are like pinball machines." ma-chines." But it becomes such overstated symbolism that it only opens up another tributary of the tedium. That kind of metaphor can only succeed in something that makes it deftly applicable as it is in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" But, to repeat, "Games" never tries to emulate anything even close to that caliber. It merely means to shock and it succeeds in that end for only about 20 of its endless 105 minutes. Yet even in those scenes that somehow manage to terrify, the director too predictably calls upon the traditional close-up of the twisting doorknob, the zoom-lens close-up of the dead but haunting victim, and the ringing phone that when answered is silent. Terror is at the core of the picture. The terrifying power is, for example, unimpeachable when Miss Ross fumbles to plug in the phone to call for help while the "ghost" accosts her. These sort of circuits, though, are short-lived. All the stuff around that core is gnawed away by an almost al-most unrelenting boredom. For far too long, for instance, Miss Signoret narrates nar-rates the unbroken story of the two men who dueled over her long ago. By her unconvincing rendering of the melodramatic dialogue, even she seems bored with it all. It isn't difficult to mistake her climactic gasp or a yawn. The ending tends to overexplain to the same" effect. It's clear when Caan takes a gory eye-patch off the eye of the "victim" Miss Ross has returned to the dead once more, that he intened to drive his rich wife mad. It's even predictable that his other partner Miss Signoret will kill Caan as well to have all the money. It does the story no injustice to recount it as briefly brief-ly as this. The brevity is indeed an improvement. |