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Finger on the button, eye glued to the viewfinder, he crouches there, trying to imitate a fireplug's unobtrusiveness while putting a frame around inchoate reality. But much as one admires the discipline of the cinema verite cameraman, sooner or later there comes a time when one wants to scream at him, "Stop being a camera! Start being a human being!" There are many of these moments in Streetwise, a film by Director-Cameraman Martin Bell, Mary Ellen Mark and Cheryl McCall, about adolescents adrift on the streets of Seattle. The first, surely, is when Erin, one of the principal subjects, calmly discusses with a doctor how she became a prostitute before she had had her first period. Another occurs when her alcoholic mother suggests that streetwalking may merely be a phase Erin is going through. A third happens when another of the "leads," the undersize DeWayne, visits his father in jail. Through glass, via telephone, the old man alternately pities himself and excoriates his son in a wheedling, threatening parody of parenthood. These glimpses into prematurely ruined lives are inescapably affecting.
Yet there is something that is finally repellent about Streetwise. Bell is a fine camera craftsman: he can make a scene shot in available light look as if it were shot on a sound stage. But this virtue can be a defect, for it distances the audience from the grim occurrences. By the end of the film, DeWayne is dead, with an empty Coke can resting on his coffin. One does not question the truth of that shot, only the sensibility that permits it to survive the final cut. Streetwise keeps demonstrating the cliche that life too often resembles a bad movie. But there is more to be said here, and a less polished film might have encouraged a more complex response--which should surely include anger.
By Richard Schickel
GEORGE STEVENS:
A FILMMAKER'S JOURNEY
Like few other Hollywood directors, this one embraced multitudes: Gunga Din and James Dean, Cary Grant and Anne Frank. Exploiting the movies' passion for teamwork, he wrote gags for Laurel and Hardy, struck the first sparks for Tracy and Hepburn, directed Fred and Ginger in their most sublime pas de deux (Never Gonna Dance, from Swing Time). And yet, in Alice Adams, A Place in the Sun and Giant, he displayed an affinity for ambitious outsiders with their noses pressed against the frosted window of the American dream. Maddeningly meticulous, he could earn a laugh by simply waiting out the punch line; but his obsession with visual detail finally led him down narrative blind alleys. By the end he was making not great movies but pretty pictures. In that failing he was hardly unique.
George Stevens Jr. has assembled a feature-length portrait of his father from interviews, film clips and family memorabilia (including some riveting home- away-from-home movies of the Allied landing in Normandy, which Senior filmed at the request of General Eisenhower). The chronicler has his father's sharp eye and leisurely sense of pace; he takes his time telling a story that means much to him. The perspective is both judicious and adoring, as if he were young Brandon de Wilde to his father's Shane. The old pro taught the boy how to shoot and, as this moving biography proves, how to say goodbye. R.C.