'Rachel' More Experience Than Movie

By EMERSON BATDORFF

There is one thing you can say about absolute hon esty in a motion picture: It takes ૩ lot of getting

used to..

"Rachel, Rachel," which turns out to be as honest a film as you ever are likely to see, limps along for a long stretch because it is entirely what it seems

'Rachel, Rachel'

An entirely honest film, brilliantly done, about a frustrated school teacher approaching middle age who grasps for life and misses. Or does she miss? 101 minutes.

Produced and directed by Paul Newman, screenplay by Stewart Stern from a novel, 'A Jest of God," by Margaret Lowson. Warner Bros.-Seven Arts.

Rachel Cameron Nick Kazlik Mrs. Cameron

to be, namely, a straightCalla Mackie forward story of a frustrated spinster schoolteacher approaching

middle age

with no prospects of marriage or anything else, for that matter in a small

you

town in which she humors her invalid mother. Not much here, might say, to grip one if you don't floss it up with a lot of production tech-

Niall Cameron Preacher Hector Jonas Leighton Siddley Reverend Wood Rachel (child). James Verla

Lee Shabab Nick (child) Bartender

....

the audience to the fact that the film never speaks in Hollywood convention.

THE FILM gets immeasurably more interesting after the mid point, although it never gets theatrical. It is ways life pretty much as it is lived.

Just when you figure you Joanne Woodward might be hanging around for a failure, the simple. magnificence of Joanne Woodward as the Rachel of the title begins to penetrate.

James Olson ........Kate Harrington Estelle Parsons .........................Donald Moffatt Terry Kiser Frank Corsaro Bernard Barrow ..Geraldine Fitzgerald Nell Potts ......Shawn Campbell ..................................... Violet Dunn Tod Engle Bruno Engl

plain,

awkward.

The Izzy Singer gentle school teacher marshals all her daydreams and aspirations and fears into a phalanx and they gang up on you and the gang up on you and the film becomes more of an

nique and stereotype phoni-

ness. And you would be right. But all this scene setting is necessary; in part it's necessary to acclimate

experience than a motion picture.

Miss Woodward's husband, Paul Newman, who produced and directed, uses craft, not guile. He is deft with slow motion to show moods and he displays a splendid ability to snap from present to past and back again without wrench-

ing the audience's collective neck.

HERS IS the only character fully explored in the film, but she is what it's all about.

The other characters, all brilliantly taken, are shown merely as they affect her. The mother (Kate Harrington) who craftily keeps the daughter under her thumb, her friend Calla (Estelle Parsons), teacher who may be lesbian: Nick (James Olson) the man she finds in desper-

ation as she reaches 35 with nothing having happened so far.

"My life is half over," she says; "All the rest is downhill toward the grave."

Yet it is not entirely sad. The film ends with hope of a sort. True to its creed of honesty it presents no typical movie idea of good things to come.