Hokum of Yore

HOKUM OF YORE JOHN SIMON In their current desperation, movies will stop at nothing-not even at turning back the clock to a time remote enough for the clock not yet to have been invented. As a nostrum against feminism, for example, we have now a spate of pictures about variously invalided young women, rendered weak enough to be sorely in need of old-fashioned male protection. And then there are all- around tearjerkers whose suffering heroes and heroines live in times that have not the slightest lived-in look.

Consider Franco Zeffirelli’s The Champ, a remake of the 1931 King Vidor movie (rancid even in its own day) in which everything is brought up to date except the film’s mentality. We are to believe, in this Walter Newman script, that Jon Voight, a former world-champion boxer, is reduced to being a stableboy at the Hialeah race track, in a .d . 1979, and also an incorrigible boozer and gambler. But ever since his wife, Faye Dunaway, walked out on him to marry a millionaire gerontologist and set herself up as a leading fashion designer (from rags to riches in a few years, perhaps; but from rags to haute couture?), Voight has been bringing up their son, little Ricky Schroder, with the kind of paternal solicitude we have come to expect from a morally untarnished crap-shooting alcoholic.

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John Simon

HOKUM OF YORE JOHN SIMON In their current desperation, movies will stop at nothing-not even at turning back the clock to a time remote enough for the clock not yet to have been invented. As a nostrum against feminism, for example, we have now a spate of pictures about variously invalided young women, rendered weak enough to be sorely in need of old-fashioned male protection. And then there are all- around tearjerkers whose suffering heroes and heroines live in times that have not the slightest lived-in look.

Consider Franco Zeffirelli’s The Champ, a remake of the 1931 King Vidor movie (rancid even in its own day) in which everything is brought up to date except the film’s mentality. We are to believe, in this Walter Newman script, that Jon Voight, a former world-champion boxer, is reduced to being a stableboy at the Hialeah race track, in a .d . 1979, and also an incorrigible boozer and gambler. But ever since his wife, Faye Dunaway, walked out on him to marry a millionaire gerontologist and set herself up as a leading fashion designer (from rags to riches in a few years, perhaps; but from rags to haute couture?), Voight has been bringing up their son, little Ricky Schroder, with the kind of paternal solicitude we have come to expect from a morally untarnished crap-shooting alcoholic.