Sunken Ship

By JAY COCKS

CINDERELLA LIBERTY Directed by MARK RYDELL Screenplay by DARRYL PONICSAN

This is the one about the sailor and the whore, and is there anyone out there who still cares?

The unmarried whore has a son, who is part black and approximately twelve years old, just the age the sailor had reached when his own warmly remembered father died. It is immediately apparent that the sailor will begin to act as surrogate father. Indeed, it seems reasonable to expect that the movie will end with a shot of the sailor and the kid walking away from the camera, arms around each other, talking bravely about the future. Mark Rydell is not a director (The Fox, The Cowboys) to avert cliches or confound expectations. The only curiosity is what takes him so long to get around to such a finale.

In fact, he has a great many other requirements to work through first, including the death-of-the-newborn-baby scene, the man-alone-in-the-city scene, and assorted other episodes that melt together into a trampled, slushy texture. There are also a lot of standard service comedy jokes that sound like an R-rated Sergeant Bilko.

The whore (well acted by Marsha Mason) does not, at least, have a heart of gold. What she does have is a consuming pathology that the sailor finds irresistibly attractive. If furies of masochism lash at him, though, they are not gone into. Cinderella Liberty wants to be cute and sentimental and tries very hard to turn behavior like child desertion into the stuff of melancholy whimsy. All during this gruesome exercise there are some sharp supporting performances, notably by Allyn Ann McLerie as a snippy social worker and Allan Arbus and David Proval as a couple of Navymen. James Caan and Kirk Calloway, as the sailor and the kid, are very good too -- so much better than the material, in fact, that you almost wonder why they bothered.

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