MISTER FREEDOM (1969)



DONALD PLEASENCE.....Dr. Freedom
DELPHINE SEYRIG.....Marie-Madeleine
JOHN ABBEY.....Mister Freedom
PHILIPPE NOIRET.....Moujik Man
CATHERINE ROUVEL.....Marie Rouge

Written and Directed by WILLIAM KLEIN
Produced by GUY BELFOND, MICHEL ZEMER, and CHRISTIAN THIVAT


REVIEW BY VINCENT CANBY


Night. Exterior. Stock shots of rioting. Helmeted white policemen with billy clubs go after helpless black citizens. Fire engines and paddy wagons race through the streets. On the soundtrack, the roar of machine guns. Cut to interior, police station. Enter an all-American boy who looks something like an inflated George Plimpton (that is, George Plimpton after six weeks with Charles Atlas). On wall can be seen a poster ("Wanted for Treason: John F. Kennedy"). Man opens a can of Colt 45.

Thus begins William Klein's Mister Freedom, an epically mindless parable about contemporary America in the form of a live-action cartoon strip. Mister Freedom (John Abbey) is a mild-mannered, skull-busting sheriff who, like Clark Kent, spends his off-duty hours dressed like a patriotic Lesbian drag queen (red-white-and-blue shoulder pads, space helmet, groin protector) and making the world safe for the United States military-industrial complex. His latest assignment: Paris, to save France from the Commies.

I hope that by some oversight I don't make any of this sound amusing or thought-provoking. It isn't. In fact, Mister Freedom is so witless that it could give anti-Americanism a bad name---that is, the sort of "anti-Americanism" that's equated with legitimate opposition to United States domestic and foreign policy.

Klein, an American artist-photographer-filmmaker ("Far From Vietnam," "Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee") who lives in Paris, is against the war in Vietnam, racial discrimination, the C.I.A., Westmoreland, Rusk, Johnson, Hitler, corn flakes. He is so concerned, apparently, that he felt he must pour out his emotions in this bland pop fantasy that can only hope to speak to members of his cast (which includes Delphine Seyrig, Philippe Noiret and Donald Pleasence, who are billed, and Yves Montand, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Simone Signoret, who are not billed), to their families, and to those people who have abandoned thinking as a matter of principle.

Instead of ideas, the film deals entirely in the sort of pre-conditioned attitudes that are the stuff of single panel newspaper cartoons, not movies, not even pop movies. With the possible exception of Donald Pleasence, who appears only as a face on Mister Freedom's wristwatch TV receiver, all the performers look like the embarrassed participants in an amateur theatrical.

Mister Freedom was made several years ago, but I suspect that it must have seemed as irrelevant then as it does now---irrelevant and somewhat self-indulgent, since this sore of dissent serves only the purposes of ego. It opened yesterday at the Cinema Village as part of the Grove Press International Film Festival.



Review © 1970 THE NEW YORK TIMES. All Rights Reserved.

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