‘Butterflies’ a Gentle Character Portrait

Rex Reed

The problem with Butterflies Are Free, the new movie M.L. Frankovich has produced from Leonard Gershe’s Broadway play, which opened yesterday at Radio City Music Hall, is one of mobility. I think it’s been solved quite nicely. Most movies made from-plays send critics screaming to their Smith-Coronas protesting with the same denunciation: “It’s not cinematic!”

Sometimes it’s true. But one of the test of a good play is whether it can stand up under it’s own strength when the Hollywood hacks work it over in an effort to “open it up”, as they say in the trade. With Butterflies Are Free, some literary angel must have been looking at the shoulders of everyone one involved, because they haven’t “opened it up” just to make an opulent movie out of essentially leek-thin entertainment, and as a result more insight and sweetness have been squeezed out of it than I thought possible.

Butterflies Are Free, as you probably already know already, is a charming, bittersweet love story about a blind boy who has left the comfortable suburban home of his doting, well-meaning but quintessentially stifling and over-protective mother to start a new life on his own, and the golden hippie next door who helps him find his way in a world of dark but hopeful promise. The whole thing takes place in one room, which doesn’t always make for the most promising kind of movie. Some movies based on plays in one set-piece can be expanded, but this one has a particularly awkward barrier: you can’t have the central character roaming all over the place saying his lines and playing his scenes in jazzy locations. He must stay in that room he knows as well as the feel of his own toes, where everything is familiar with its own special place, because that is his escape. He’s already been outside, with a seeing eye mother, but can he make his own life work in his own room? This is the filmmaker’s problem- how to keep everyone in that room and not bore everyone to death- and a young director with muscular thoughts about style and movement named Milton Katselas has made it work.

The screen is full of stage business, but Charles Lang (the brilliant cinematographer who made Inside Daisy Clover such a thing of beauty to look at) does not move in on it too quickly. The characters flow gently into the story, and once they’re there, they aren’t suffocated by the camera in annoying close-ups as thought they were getting a pillow over their faces. Two attempts are made to conventionalize the proceedings-once, when the girl leads the blind boy through the streets to a funky clothing store to but some “head gear, and the second time, when the mother takes the girl to an Italian restaurant-and these are the two weakest scenes in the entire film because they intrude upon the flow of language and impose on the movie, a harsh and mechanically constructed outside world.

But inside that room, I found myself drawn to the screen, lost in Mr. Gershe’s theme of human isolation, without out ever being board. Which proves, I guess, how good the play really was in the first place? A Street Car Named Desire took place in one room, too, but you forgot the problem of constriction and space because the dialogue was so beautiful and the situation so interesting. Butterflies Are Free has that same quality of making you listen and everyone involved in making the movie is to be admired for retaining it on film.

The best qualities in this film are the writing (Mr. Gershe has adapted the screenplay from his own play with agility and an inspired knowledge of movie timing) and the extraordinary performances, Edward Albert, son of actor Eddie Albert and sultry actress Margo, takes a bit of getting use to at first. He has the same wide, set-apart eyes of his mother, which sometimes have the disturbing effect of making you feel he is on the verge of turning into a leopard (remember the way she prowled the streets in The Leopard Man?). But he has an uncanny sensitivity to, and for what it’s worth, he really does look blind. Eileen Heckart gives one of the most exquisitely detailed performances you are ever likely to see on the screen, avoiding all the clichés in a magnificently sensible reading of a “mother” role that would be easy to dislike in less craftsman like hands. But for me, the film’s major and most delightful surprise is Goldie Hawn, who has learned an awful lot about acting in a very short amount of time.

In her early films, all that cutesie-pie dumbness was fairly obnoxious ( I really couldn’t stand her in Cactus Flower), but flickers of talent showed through under Richard Brooks’ sturdy direction in $, the sureness and depth with she plays the rootless kook in this film convinces me that ZI should change my way of thinking. I’m still not sure she can play anything other than contemporary Judy Holiday roles, but she has learned so much about comic timing that if her screen appearances are to be restricted to the same kind of cuckoo birds, at least she seems determined to play better than anyone else. With wondrous eyes like a precocious Pekinese and 40 pounds of yellow Dynel hair, she look like a Breughel milkmaid stoned on Mountain Dew, but she is a golden daffodil of a girl and the Holly Golightly character has never been portrayed so tenderly. Butterflies Are Free is an endearing madrigal for three voices-funny, moving, honest and often quite hilarious-and it has been brought to the screen with affection and distinction. The voices are still there, but the whole thing seems orchestrated in a wiser key.