Gypped

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

KING OF THE GYPSIES

Directed and Written by Frank Pierson

Interesting. A gypsy society continuing to function between (and under) the tight-woven lines of our urban, industrial culture, roaming around, making a living out of fortunetelling and other ancient scams, avoiding even such basic paper work as birth certificates. To the degree that King of the Gypsies shows us something of how these people survive, it is an interesting and rather original movie.

But after the first half-hour the movie documentary detail thins out, and the film gets mired in a conventional drama of generational conflict. Sterling Hayden, as the aging king (of New York and eastern Pennsylvania), wishes to pass over his violent and ne'er-do-well son (Judd Hirsch) and grant his title to his grandson Dave (Eric Roberts). This young man is more interested in joining the American mainstream than he is in defending the traditional way of life, though he hates his father, if anything, more than his grandfather does. When his father attempts to sell Dave's young sister into marriage, the youth turns violently patricidal. The community hides his crime from ever befuddled authority and, in the end, Roberts accepts the medallion and ring that symbolize leadership of this little stateless state.

All this melodrama is strongly stated, but the performers for the most part (Susan Sarandon as the mother of the king-to-be is an exception) fail to convince us that their Romany roots are more than makeup deep. The folk ceremonies are routinely lusty, the dark familial passions are what we have come to expect in movies about subcultural persistence.

Having said all that, one must admit that there is a certain liveliness in Director Pierson's work. He has a way of filling out the frame with energetic, emotionally charged-up figures. There are color and movement in his work, and it contrasts vividly with the more calculated and congealed commercialism of current American movie fare. One suspects Pierson was undercut by his producers, who perhaps imposed safe, name character actors on him, asking him to force up the predictable parts in his script and play down what might be more surprising. The conclusion is that you could do worse than to see Gypsies, but that the film makers could quite easily have done much better by it.

--Richard Schickel

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