Time to wag a warning finger at Andy Warhol

NEW YORK-It has come time to wag a warning finger at Andy Warhol and his underground friends and tell them, politely but firmly, that they are pushing a reckless thing too far.

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It was all right so long as these adventures in the realm of independent cinema stayed in Greenwich Village or on the south side of 42d Street and splattered their naughty-boy pictures on congenial basement screens or even sent them around to college outlets for the edification of undergraduate voyeurs.

But now that their underground has surfaced on West 57th Street, where the cinema rendezvous has installed Warhol's most ambitious peep-show put-on, "The Chelsea Girls," it is time for permissive adults to stop winking, at their too precocious pranks and start calling a lot of their cut-ups especially this one actly what they are.

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It is particularly important to put a stout spoke in Warhol's wheel and make it

By Bosley Crowther

apparent how flimsy his highly pretentious filming is, because too many hopeful filmmakers, like the youngsters in the cinema schools, are letting themselves be influenced by Warhol's frankly lackadaisical style and by the clatter of adulation he has got from the underground crowd.

So let's get it said without quibbling that "The So let's get it said with. Chelsea Girls" is really nothing more than an extensive and pretentious entertainment for voyeurs, letting them peer (I should add, quickly, for all of three and a half hours!) at what is presumably happening in several rooms of a New York hotel.

very

manifestations of a And what it looks at are small segment of New York life the lower level of degenerate dope-pushers, and deviates as distinct from the upper level perverts who are obviously outside the interest of this morbid ly exhibitionistic film.

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Already some sympathetic critics have hailed it as a shattering tour de force that artfully reveals à composite of contemporary life. But this is absurdly overstating.a documentation which, at best, shows the squalor of a few unfortunate people and not very artfully at that.

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There are technical virtuosities. Warhol elaborately employs the split screen (two pictures at the same time), which has become popular underground. The sound-track is frequently distorted to give a fuzzy effect to dialogue or a sort of psychedelic atonality to the

musical score. Shots Shots are held for several minutes, with the camera zooming in from time to time to take. a look at an irrelevant detail, then zooming out. However, there are a few places where Warhol uses the two panel screen to suggest a dramatic statement, maudlin though it in which, a fat, old, drunken woman is hideously beratmay be. There is a setup ing her homosexual son in young woman who has been a room with a pensive established in a previous

sequence as a lesbian.

Or there is an interminable sequence in which a homosexual rambles on and on in a narcoticized state about his being the Pope and qualified to hear a young woman's confession. But if anyone has a notion that Warhol's films either this one or several others that have been floating around in the underground

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might compare with such avant-garde classics as Luis Bunuel's "The Andalusian Dog" or Jean Cocteau's "The Blood of a Poet," they should forget it.

This film most closely compares to such latter-day documentations of freaks

and degenerates as Gualti-

ero Jacopetti's "Mondoj Cane" and "Women of The World."

But, heaven knows, there are more than homosexuals and dope addicts and washed-out women in this world! Warhol and the underground fellows might vary their obsessions with decay by making a couple of films about film-makers who are too solemn to see 'the humor in themselves. That would be a good puton. But it would be at their own expense.

New York Times Service