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Polanski inexplicably uses all the absurdist conventions that he mocked so deftly in Cul de Sac. The only moment of real comic invention is a sight gag of a maid picking up the wrong aerosol can and spraying a room with shaving cream instead of air freshener. Marcello Mastroianni and Hugh Griffith, among others, are swept along, unprotesting, in the flurry of bad taste that drives the movie forward.
YOUR THREE MINUTES ARE UP. A chiseler and petty con man (Ron Leibman) helps his shy pal (Beau Bridges) throw off the shackles of responsibility to fiancée (Janet Margolin) and job (insurance). He takes him up the California coast from Los Angeles, tutors him in the arts of the small-time swindle and passes off all this retarded juvenile delinquency as nonconformity and freedom. Bridges buys it all, which makes him even more gullible than anyone has a right to expect. There is no wit in any of this, no good intuition about people, no sense either of place or irony. Bridges, normally an excellent actor, seems to be doing an imitation of Dagwood Bumstead. Leibman, equally talented (witness his definitive urban victim in Carl Reiner's superb Where's Papa?), turns himself into a kind of manic dervish, aggressively obnoxious, without relief or modulation. ·J.C.