Cinema Canada (Jun 1978)

FILM REVIEWS EC, Mc Luhan’s THE THIRD WALKER d: T.C. McLuhan, sc: Robert Thom, ph: Robert Fiore, ed: Ulla Ryghe, sd: Richard Lightstone, sd. ed. Ken HeelyRay, a.d.: William McCrow, m: Paul Hoffert, l.p.: Colleen Dewhurst, William Shatner, Frank Moore, Monique Mercure, Tony Meyer, David Meyer, Andrée Pelletier, Diana LeBlanc, exec. p: Melvin Simon and Quadrant Films, p: T.C. McLuhan, Brian Winston, p.c. Wychwood Productions (1977), col: 35mm, running time: 93 minutes. The Third Walker may find a few enthusiastic defenders. More likely it will get the bloody bludgeon; savage wit rather than film criticism. The movie is an easy target for all those middlebrow reviewers who have no tolerance for any film outside the middleground and who customarily treat the work of Resnais, Pasolini, Warhol (to say nothing of more radical directors) as if it were an illegitimate use of celluloid. In this case the close spiritual relatives of The Third Walker are those eccentric Canadian movies — Gordon Shepherd’s Eliza’s Horoscope, Paul Almond’s Journey, Don Owen’s The Ernie Game, Joyce Weiland’s The Far Shore, among others — in which it seems the material is far more meaningful to the director than it is to anyone else. There are two explanations for this odd form of filmmaking; one prosaic — they are often the handiwork of someone who wrote, produced and directed the whole thing, so that there is little opportunity for internal criticism. By the time the movie is finished, it’s way off the deep-end, as subjective as an Elizabeth Smart novel or a Sylvia Plath poem. It takes a monumental obtuseness not to recognize the different latitudes permitted a literary work with its far less-costly economic base, and a supposedly-commercial fea 38/Cinema Canada (Colleen Dewhurst and Monique Mercure) ture weighing in between $600,000 and $1 million, requiring the attention and support of millions of filmgoers to break even. The other (or additional) explanation for our long list of idiosyncratic films is that there is so little sense of artistic community in Canada we. don’t know what the common language, or the meeting grounds, of our culture should be. In this view, the directors of these films had no inkling that their films would strike many as being unintelligible. They want to establish a distinctive film culture. They want to break with American mass-tastes. But they have great difficulty creating something that is distinctively Canadian and passionately interesting to replace the dynamic Waiting for the operation to establish which of the three boys are the twins... mass culture originating in New York and Los Angeles. By now, after so many Canadian film underdevelopment flops, one would expect any director to realize a few basic rules of the business: (a) the general public doesn’t like elliptical, non-linear forms of film story-telling and no such film is ever as popular as those with a straightforward narrative. Moreoever, few stories benefit from a fragmented structure. For every Blow Up, If... or The Servant that can justify their obliqueness, and which did become major hits, there are dozens of obscurantist muddles — confusing films about nothing vital — that regularly die at the box office and certainly are no model to follow. (b) Any