The Bachelor Party

Gentlemen's clubs aren't the only place where pornographic movies are shown. In a bachelor apartment in Brooklyn five white collar workers watched them into the early hours of the morning, with quite ungentlemanly motives. Three of them watched because they were a little drunk and a little fed up with their wifes, one because he was a virgin and was going to be married in two days, and the other because he just liked sex.

The Bachelor Party, the second hyper-realistic effort of Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, is about the stunning weight of responsibility, and the revulsion from it, that a young man feels when his wife becomes pregnant for the first time. His protest against the complications of a home and family that are about to entangle him for life becomes a desire to sleep with a young woman he meets in Greenwich Village on the night of the party.

When he sees that, for all their high spirited freedom, what both the Village girl and his roving, unattached friend desperately want is just what he unwittingly possesses--a loving and faithful mate--he thinks again. The various plights of the other men, one endangering his health to keep his children in school, serve either to egg him on to infidelity or remind hime of his good fortune.

The biggest fault of the film comes from this everybody-has-a-story approach to all the characters. The life histories and present predicaments of each minor character intrude on the main action too much and tend to distract attention from the principals. You leave the theater confused by incidental episodes and uncertain about the director and script writer's purpose. If their purpose was to make a movie exactly life-like by packing it with interesting but irrelevant happenings, they have come dangerously close to succeding. Perhaps the greatest criticism of all cinematographic realists is that they are not selective enough in their presentation of realistic events to escape the inconclusiveness of real life while retaining the dramatic order necessary even for movies. Eisensein's staging of a play in its actual factory setting failed just because the realistic cannot be the real itself.

Aside from this The Bachelor Party is succesful and well worth seeing. Charley, the young man (Don Murray), and his wife (Pat Smith) are both properly ordinary looking and, their intent being to act as naturally and untheatrically as possible, do very well. Jack Warner is just right in another of his Dodger fan roles and E.G. Marshall gives a good performance, if he is a little too intent on stripping bare his character for all to see. Carolyn Jones gives the best performance as the fast and intellectually chic Villager who is so wretched that she doesn't know when she is lying and when she is not. She has the mannerisms, appearance and state of mind of that grotesque personality down pat.

The photography is done in the best Italian neo-realism style, with many close-ups, little camera movement, and with nearly every scene, from subways to bars, shot on location. Script-writer Chayefsky's ear for conspicuously natural speech is better than ever.