Quick Cuts

By JAY COCKS, RICHARD SCHICKEL, J.C.

McQ presents John Wayne in civvies, which seems a little like dressing Gary Grant in bib overalls. The Duke messes around casually with playing the title character, a Seattle cop who quits the force to press a vigorous one-man investigation of his partner's death. His searches lead to discoveries of gangsterism in the import business, corruption in high places, lax moral standards in corporations and other illuminations that come as more of a surprise to Wayne than anyone else.

The action sequences are frequent but arthritic. Colleen Dewhurst -- whom one hardly expects to find in such company--provides an agreeable cameo as a roundheeled cocktail waitress with a taste for cocaine. The Duke remains amiable and unruffled throughout, but it is a bit troubling to see him poaching so obviously on Clint Eastwood's loner-cop territory.

As for Eastwood himself, he makes a halfhearted attempt, in MAGNUM FORCE, to clean up Dirty Harry, that law-and-order fascist manque whom you hated to hate a couple of seasons back. Once again, as in the 1971 film named for him, Detective Harry Callahan (Eastwood) is confronted by a series of apparently motiveless, definitely psychopathic murders. This time, it turns out, they are not the work of an isolated madman but of a self-appointed death squad, members of Harry's own San Francisco police department who have grown impatient with the delays and niceties of the rule of law. This gives Harry an opportunity to pull the old switcheroo. Unlikely as it seems, he announces that for all his notorious individualism he believes in working for change through the system.

This liberal-mindedness on the part of the film makers seems more opportunistic than deeply felt--an attempt, perhaps, to still political criticism of the earlier film. But what really spoils the formula is a thin and meandering script by John Milius and listless direction by Ted Post, whose work cannot stand even glancing comparison with Don Siegel's authoritative handling of Dirty Harry. The film climaxes, as all policiers apparently must, with a car chase, but it is nowhere near as interesting as the successful off-casting of nice Hal Holbrook as a heavy. He is the only one present who seems genuinely interested in What's going on.

THE FIGHTERS concerns the first Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier bout in March 1971 and shows every moment of every round, recorded by a battery of cameras stationed all over Madison Square Garden. With only this fight footage, meticulously edited, Director William Greaves would have had a fine sports film. What lifts The Fighters out of the special-interest category is the first hour of documentary on the preparations for the match. The fighters, the promoters, the managers, the hangers-on, all speak a kind of spiked Odets chatter that makes the movie look and sound like a cinema verite replay of Body and Soul. Greaves has a quick eye and an obvious affection for the more flamboyant personalities behind the sport. A reporter at a swanky press reception rather tentatively badgers Promoter Jack Kent Cooke about the high cost of fight tickets. "Well, I'd like everyone to drive a Cadillac, like everybody to be employed, get a good education," Cooke replies with a fulsome disdain. "But," he adds with ill-disguised glee, "it just isn't that kind of world."

Ali is shrewdly pyrotechnical, as usual, Frazier stolid but with a certain quiet wit. Asked just before the match how the $2.5 million purse makes him feel, he replies with ironic deliberation that "it gives me the inspiration to do a little more." The Fighters captures the skill and challenge of the sport, as well as its grand carnival spirit, as surely and lovingly as AJ. Liebling did in The Sweet Science. That is saying a great deal. sbJC

Boone, N.C., is WHERE THE LILIES BLOOM, and where the Luther family, under the reluctant direction of 14-year-old Mary Call, is struggling to make do. Father, widowed years ago, has died. On his deathbed he placed Mary Call (more responsible than her dreamy older sister Devola) in charge of all Luther business, including the matter of keeping Kiser Pease, the acquisitive neighbor down the road, a good country mile away from Devola, Most of the movie is taken up with Mary Call's straining to live up to her responsibility, to fulfill a promise made mistakenly out of unquestioning affection.

There is a certain charm and challenge in all this. The movie--produced by Robert B. Radnitz (Sounder)--scrupulous about matters of locale and decoration, careful to avoid subverting the circumstances of poverty into sentimentality. The Luther kids--all played by nonprofessional actors--live in a cabin wallpapered with newspaper, which also serves from time to time as a residence for a pet pig and a cow. The surrounding mountain country has a lavish beauty, on which the Luther cabin is a canker.

Beyond physical details, Where the Lilies Bloom misses any real sense of the proud and strangled lives it portrays Mary Call and the others never really show any deep desperation. The movie softens everything, keeps the characters busy with practical strategies like convincing the neighbors that their father is still alive so that they will not all be shipped off to an orphanage.

This sort of dilution has its source in the script by Earl Hamner Jr., creator of television's The Waltons, a soft cow-eyed evocation of the Depression struggles of another Southern mountain family. Like John-Boy Walton, Mary Call wants to be a writer, and Hamner supplies reveries for her ("Lately I've begun to feel a bottomless fright") that have much less adolescent intensity than a kind of brilliantined adult sentimentality. Where the Lilies Bloom was made as a G-rated family movie, which is the probable reason-- though hardly a good excuse-- for avoiding the harsher, more pressing realities of the situation the movie portrays. It wants to be liked for its good intentions alone.

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