PARTISAN REVIEW
449
scape and event, between space and freedom, a visceral awareness of
the oppression of closed spaces - squalid rooms, car interiors, jail
cells. Except for an unsuccessfully lyric swimming scene near the
beginning of the film,
The Getaway
is
starkly and accurately ob–
served, dense with the feel of things. Doc and Carol's entrapment in
a garbage truck, to single out the film's most painful and brilliant
scene, achieves a visual poetry in the concentration of its extraordi–
nary detail. There are flaws in the movie, lapses of taste, as in the
unrelentingly abrasive subplot, and a distractingly disconnected per–
formance (as if her responses were dubbed) by Ali MacGraw, but they
are minor.
As
with the undervalued and misunderstood
Straw Dogs,
one leaves
The Getaway
released and exhilarated, having escaped for
the moment one's own prison, in touch (or is it illusion? - the illu–
sion of an illusion ) with one's own unexplored potentialities for sight.
It
becomes clearer with each new film that Sam Peckinpah is
the most instinctively cinematic director now working in American
films.
Ride the High Country,
his second film, still seems to me
his
most fully realized and spacious work; the best of the later ones,
Straw Dogs
and
The Wild Bunch,
are more dazzling and more flawed.
Peckinpah is not at a loss for an audience so he needs no special
pleading.
The Getaway
is one of the few good films that an all-or–
nothing, junk-driving-out-art distribution system hasn't caused to
vanish after a brief first run. On the other hand, if my friends' reac–
tions are indicative, an intellectual audience, its notions of film hope–
lessly and snobbishly circumscribed by literary criteria, is losing out
on Peckinpah. Film pleasures being in short supply, I recommend
another look.
3. Four Nights of a Dreamer
Although the great French filmmaker, Robert Bresson, deals es–
sentially with inner motion as opposed to external action, like Peck–
inpah he is concerned with the spaces of imprisonment and escape.
It's not so much that opposites attract as that they include each other
at the deepest level. Unlike Peckinpah's, Bresson's cinema, with the
possible exception of
Diary of a Country Priest
which appears like a
moral imperative in most college film series, is virtually unknown to
the casual filmgoer. His films are mostly unknown because they are
almost nowhere to be seen.
Four Nights of a Dreamer,
his most re-
