Sex Stars of 1971

No matter what--or whom--the charts may show, the major stars of 1971 were neither brawny males nor voluptuous females. According to box-office ratings (and what else is there?), they were a pack of rats (Willard), a couple of schools of sharks (Blue Water, White Death), an unsettling collection of insects (The Hellstrom Chronicle) and a particularly virulent and elusive virus from outer space (The Andromeda Strain). The biology lessons that have for so long been the number-one course in the cinema's college of scatological knowledge were seemingly, if perhaps only momentarily, replaced by natural (or unnatural) history. Although the rats of Willard and the bugs of Hellstrom were never as charming as their two-legged counterparts, they exerted an odd fascination that not even their production companies had anticipated.

But then, 1971 was a curious and unpredictable year. No one--least of all the executives at Paramount--could possibly have prophesied that the sentimental, old-fashioned Love Story would draw record crowds to the nation's moviehouses. Then, as if to belie any hearts-and-flowers trend, Mike Nichols' cold and clinical dissection of modern, manipulative man in Carnal Knowledge garnered both critical acclaim and popular approval. One was as romantic as a lilac garden, the other as astringent as a styptic pencil. The wonder is that although the two pictures seemed to be separated by a chasm several decades wide, they appeared within a few months of each other. And whereas early in the year the magazines and Sunday supplements had been touting the rhapsodic charms of Ali MacGraw and Ryan O'Neal on virtually every newsstand--confidently asserting, as did Time, that thanks to them, the American cinema was about to undergo "a fresh flowering of the romance and sentimentalism of the Thirties and Forties"--by summer these same publications' scriveners were busily engaged in heralding what one called "the new mood of utter sexual candor on the American screen" exemplified by Carnal Knowledge's distinctly unromantic Jack Nicholson and petulant floozy Ann-Margret.

While the Love Story band wagon was at full throttle, most commentators on the movie scene argued that the film's vast popularity indicated that audiences were once again avid for superstars--those rare creatures whose names exert a magic that galvanizes audiences into buying tickets, no matter what the vehicle. Ali and Ryan were supposed to be the shining examples; but when O'Neal appeared less than six months later as William Holden's cowboy cohort in Wild Rovers, the picture went nowhere, emphasizing once again that today it's the movies that make the stars and not the other way around. What the public buys is a story; and if a studio is fortunate enough to hit upon the chemistry of casting that brings its characters to life, then, maybe, a star is born. But today's new stars don't seem to twinkle as long nor as brightly as those glamorous luminaries who once studded the rosters of the major studios. Certainly their presence no longer ensures the success of any picture they may choose to grace.

Ali MacGraw, of course, has been off the screen altogether since her poignant deathbed scene in Love Story almost a year ago. Even before the picture went into production, the willowy, dark-eyed former New York model was being seen everywhere with Paramount's flashingly handsome production head, Robert Evans. When Evans finally read the script, which had been brought to him by ex-agent-turned-producer Howard Minsky, it was with Ali's image firmly in mind. He proceeded to back the production with vigor, fidelity and devotion--so much so that after the film had been shot and assembled, Evans scrapped what he deemed to be an unsuitable score and commissioned France's talented Francis Lai to come up with the music that ultimately added so much to the romantic appeal of Love Story. Meanwhile, Evans was starring in a love story of his own, one that led him to the altar with Ali. By the time of the film's jubilant Hollywood preview last December, the bride was noticeably pregnant; and even as the picture was opening around the country to record-smashing grosses, she presented her beaming husband with an infant son. Now Ali has exchanged her neobohemian life style in Manhattan for a more establishment existence in Evans' 18-room Beverly Hills mansion--although presumably she's still on the lookout for another promising script.

If for Ali MacGraw it was a matter of Goodbye, Columbus, hello, Hollywood--that saga of overnight stardom that still keeps young hearts beating hopefully from Schwab's to Schrafft's--for the spirited, Swedish-born Ann-Margret, it took nine years and 24 movies before anyone realized that locked up in that sensuous face and sexy body was an actress of considerable depth and emotion. The first to sense it was director Mike Nichols, who tested her for Carnal Knowledge, then signed her as soon as the print was developed. His choice proved astonishingly apt. Ann-Margret, who has a tendency to put on a bit of extra flesh, presented precisely the slightly overripe quality that Nichols had in mind for the character of Bobbie, the girl who shares Jack Nicholson's pad in the hope that he will one day offer her a ring. "Her breasts," wrote Brad Darrach of Time, "with suspicious suddenness had taken on melony dimensions. Had she seen the silicone man?" Not so, said Ann-Margret, who had purposely eaten her way into the role; she confessed that when she gains weight, she puts it on there.

More meaningful than her mammary development, however, has been her maturation from sex symbol to sex star. A bundle of supercharged energy who stole the Academy Award show of 1962 with an electrifying song-and-dance number, Ann-Margret (nee Ann-Margret Olsson) was promptly cast to type as the teenaged fan of a rock-'n'-roll idol in Bye, Bye Birdie--and seemed destined to go no farther. She played a series of vacuous sexpots opposite such well-known but not particularly challenging stars as Dean Martin, Elvis Presley and, more recently, "Broadway Joe" Namath. When Stanley Kramer announced that she was to play the graduate student who shacks up with Professor Anthony Quinn in R. P. M., it seemed like a triumph of miscasting unparalleled since Otto Preminger presented Jean Seberg as Saint Joan. Ann-Margret gave the film a couple of memorable nude scenes but not much more. It took Nichols to bring out her heretofore hidden talent for projecting raw emotion.

The curious thing about Ann-Margret is that in her private life she is quiet, shy, almost mousy. She rarely entertains and even more rarely goes out, preferring the seclusion of the mountaintop estate (once the property of Humphrey Bogart) that she shares with her husband/manager, Roger Smith. The Smiths live without ostentation--except, perhaps, for the gold-plated golf cart in which they guide their guests up the last half mile or so of the winding road to the house. But Ann-Margret on the job is a different person entirely. Onstage--at Las Vegas, in the Penthouse showroom of the Playboy Club-Hotel in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, or during the taping of her recurrent TV specials--she becomes a woman of almost terrifying dedication. No stunt is too risky, no routine too demanding, no idea too far out for her to pour into it all of her energies and talent. But so insecure is she that back in her dressing room, the plaudits of the audience still ringing in her ears, she will ask tremulously, "Was I all right?"

It was this quality, no doubt, far more than her implicit eroticism--eroticism, after all, drips from the trees in Hollywood--that Mike Nichols wanted for Bobbie in Carnal Knowledge. He needed a girl who was not only sexy but vulnerable and insecure; and Ann-Margret is all of these. "I'm all emotion," she said recently. "Mike convinced me I was Bobbie. I lost myself during the weeks of rehearsal and shooting"--done, incidentally, in a Vancouver studio chosen purposely by Nichols for its quiet and seclusion. Although her revealing nude scenes in the film disturbed her residual puritanism, she played them with an honesty that added notably to their artistry and conviction. Now in demand for complex roles of which no one hitherto had thought her capable--she describes her next film commitment, Radioland, as "a kind of female Five Easy Pieces"--Ann-Margret has suddenly shot into the forefront of stars who project sexuality and can act.

It is typical of Ann-Margret that shortly after Carnal Knowledge's Hollywood preview, she confided to a female friend, "I couldn't tell a thing about my own performance, but I knew that Candy was great." The film did, indeed, provide a kind of affirmation of artistry for its other female star, the beauteous Candice Bergen. Blessed with patrician good looks, a sharp intelligence and, through father Edgar Bergen, ready access to any avenue of show business she might choose, Miss Bergen frequently asserted that she had no desire to be an actress (to which a number of critics unchivalrously responded that there was no need for such disavowal--she wasn't one anyway). Actress or no, since her first appearance as the Lesbian member of Mary McCarthy's The Group back in 1966, Miss Bergen's blonde presence has been in constant demand by the studios--in recent years, to the tune of $200,000 per demand. But mere money has never been enough to silence the outspoken Candy. After having been raped (cinematically) in two successive Westerns, Soldier Blue and The Hunting Party, she told a magazine reporter: "I can see the reviews now--'Candiee Bergen grimaces as she loses her virginity.' All I do in the film [Hunting Party] is get raped and have orgasms. But I've got the orgasms down pat now. It's your token ten seconds of heavy breathing, followed by my baroque expression, eyes heavenward."

Now a mature 25, Candy has stopped claiming that she doesn't want to be an actress. Again, director Mike Nichols seems to have made the big difference. He used her cool, level glance and cryptic smile to such devastating effect that her presence continued to pervade the picture long after she herself had disappeared from the scene. Perhaps it was this experience that induced Candy to say, as she undertook the title role in T. R. Baskin as a mixed-up Midwestern girl: "It was time for me to begin some sort of serious involvement with acting." Her involvement, however, has not sent her to a nunnery. She is constantly being spotted at Hollywood's class-A parties and smart restaurants, generally on the arm of producer Bert Schneider. She has also taken over John Barrymore's old home (formerly occupied by Katharine Hepburn) and installed her bed in what was once Barrymore's aviary.

For Henry Fonda's leggy daughter Jane, 1971 was a year that not only enhanced her already considerable reputation as a talented young actress but also added to her offscreen image as one of the country's hotter firebrands. As the neurotic Manhattan callgirl in Klute, she gave what most critics acclaimed as the finest performance of her career--even better than her work as the suicidal marathon dancer in They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, which brought her an Academy Award nomination last year. But if she won critical kudos on the entertainment pages, her performances offcamera were met with less enthusiasm on the front pages. When she and some kindred spirits attempted to put together an antiwar revue and take it to Army bases here and abroad, the Defense Department--not unexpectedly--declined the offer. She has also stumped for liberal politicians, demonstrated for peace, lobbied for ecology and lectured for women's lib. Last winter, when she flew into the country from Canada via Cleveland, Jane was jailed after a Customs officer discovered a large quantity of pills in her luggage. What the zealous inspector took to be drugs were, on analysis, merely an assortment of vitamins, but it's a safe bet that he would have been considerably less suspicious had the actress in question been somewhat less controversial. Meanwhile, as her public image has intensified, her private life seems to have deteriorated. Insiders say that Jane's marriage to Roger Vadim has long been on the rocks and, though they're still legally wed, both go their separate ways quite casually. But the composite picture of Jane Fonda, the taut actress and energetic activist, is one that commands wide respect these days. Gone is the cliché that an artist must not lend himself to causes. Miss Fonda, speaking out with conviction, has demonstrated beyond question that she has a mind of her own.

Julie Christie, although much less outspoken than Jane Fonda, expresses her independence in her unconventional life style. Surely there are few movie fans or gossip-column readers unaware of her long-standing, intercontinental romance with Warren Beatty. This year their careers merged in the making of McCabe & Mrs. Miller, in which the beauteous Miss Christie, her hair frizzed like a Raggedy Ann doll's, played a lusty whorehouse madam with Beatty as her procurer. Not only does she charge him for their lovemaking but when he's killed at the end of the film, she solaces herself by smoking opium in a Chinese doss house. Far more genteel, at least superficially, was her role as a British manor-house patrician in Joseph Losey's The Go-Between. Because Julie Christie's special kind of beauty suggests at once intelligence, reserve and the possibilities of unbridled passion, she has inherited some of the most challenging, larger-than-life roles of recent years--in Dr. Zhivago, Far from the Madding Crowd and Petulia. It's to her credit that she has created in them a gallery of outstanding portraits; but there is also the nagging suspicion that one reason for her success is that these headstrong yet romantic heroines are, in fact, all extensions of Miss Christie herself.

There has always been, of course, a high correlation between a film star's image and the role he plays. Unlike the theater, where performances are carefully, even tediously constructed through weeks of rehearsal, in the movies the actor works by the "take," and often with a dozen or more takes and angles for a single scene. Unless an actor is exceptionally gifted, what he basically projects is himself--speaking the lines of the character the screenwriter has created. A new kind of character on the screen generally requires a new kind of personality to play the role, as Julie Christie tellingly demonstrated in Darling, the film that shot her to success. Sally Kellerman--tall, clear-eyed, sensuous--is another case in point. After knocking around Hollywood and Broadway for the better part of a decade, Sally scored overnight with her sultry performance as Hot Lips Houlihan in the award-winning M*A*S*H. She scored again as the sexy birdwoman (or womanly bird) in Brewster McCloud, even though the film itself broke no box-office records. But an odd little movie that, on the strength of her name alone, has been making its way through the 16mm circuits reveals that the real and the reel Sally Kellerman have a great deal in common. Titled Venus, it records with startling specificity her short-lived romance with photographer Lawrence Hauben, even down to their bedroom antics. She comes across as a kook--free-loving, egocentric, vulnerable, appealing: in short, as Hot Lips Houlihan. She is currently at work on a romantic role in Labyrinth, in which she plays the mistress of the accomplished British star Robert Shaw. Doubtless, her own unabashed experience will lend verisimilitude.

Cast in much the same mold as Sally, but even busier during this past year, has been Karen Black, with her tumbled tresses, exquisite profile and slightly crossed eyes. She won a New York Film Critics' award for her striking performance as the dumb, oversexed traveling partner of Jack Nicholson in the much-esteemed Five Easy Pieces and has been constantly sought after ever since. Still in her mid-20s, Miss Black lives in a small (for Hollywood) and cluttered home that bespeaks la vie bohème. But if her free and easy home life is to her liking, that same sort of existence has generally turned out rather badly for her on the screen. In Easy Rider, one of her first small roles, she was a New Orleans prostitute playing drug-induced games in a graveyard; in Five Easy Pieces, she was a pathetic baggage ultimately deserted by her lover; in Drive, He Said, after callously cuckolding her (continued on page 304)Sex Stars of 1971(continuedf from page 218) professor husband with a college basketball star, she is terrorized by the jock's jealous roommate. In A Gunfight, she was once more reduced to prostitution--but with a heart of gold that went out to co-star Johnny Cash. And in both Cisco Pike and Born to Win, she encountered the miseries that are by now an all-too-familiar part of the drug scene. But because such antiheroines are needed to mate with today's popular antiheroes, Karen Black's star is very much in the ascendant.

To this number might well be added the svelte and sexy Dyan Cannon, whose present eminence is in no small part due to her marriage (dissolved after one child) to the urbane Cary Grant. Before that, Dyan, who entered this world as Samille Diane Friesen, the product of a Baptist father and a Jewish mother, in Tacoma, Washington, had meandered through a show-business career for several years with no special distinction. Paul Mazursky, who wrote and eventually directed her in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, had such a low regard for her talents that when she applied for the role of Alice, he refused even to see her. A friendly secretary to producer Mike Frankovich put her on the list for a screen test, however, and Dyan won out over all comers. Frankovich used her again, albeit briefly, as the adulterous wife who was murdered--nude--early in Doctors' Wives and, more extensively, as the unfaithful wife of a network executive in his gaudy version of Jacqueline Susann's The Love Machine. She has also been seen recently as Sean Connery's mistress and accomplice in The Anderson Tapes and will next be on view in The Burglars with Omar Sharif and Jean-Paul Belmondo. Like Sally Kellerman and Karen Black, Dyan had a rough time getting where she wanted to go; and her experiences are reflected in her work, now receiving considerable recognition.

But there are many actresses, no less talented and often no less experienced, who seem merely to be holding their own or still awaiting that one big part that will stamp them forever with stardom. Foremost of these is lovely Jacqueline Bisset, a girl who has repeatedly demonstrated her acting ability and is not at all reluctant to exhibit her charms. (She made a noteworthy entrance in The Sweet Ride a few years ago, emerging from the surf clad only in the bottom of her bikini, and as an overly choosy callgirl in 1970's The Grasshopper, she revealed her assets with even greater determination.) Meanwhile, Jackie has been playing house with actor Michael Sarrazin, with whom she leads a drearily doped onscreen existence in Metro's belated contribution to the drug-scene cycle, Believe in Me (formerly titled Speed Is of the Essence).

The Mephisto Waltz found Miss Bisset paired--nay, merged--with Barbara Parkins, another attractive young lady who seems to have reached a plateau in her career. A veteran of television's Peyton Place, Barbara took the giant step into features as one of the more sympathetic pill poppers in Valley of the Dolls and was one of the few things worth looking at in John Huston's murky production of The Kremlin Letter. The Mephisto Waltz, a kind of poor man's Rosemary's Baby, starts out with a sound idea--a satanic pianist who assures his own immortality by transmitting his soul (and talent) to a young journalist. When Barbara, the pianist's equally demonic daughter, begins to show an interest in the lad, his wife (Jackie) also takes up Satanism and transforms herself into her rival. But, as Molly Haskell tartly noted in The Village Voice, for Jacqueline Bisset "to end up in Barbara Parkins' body with only her own perfume as the mark of her essence seems rather a Pyrrhic victory." Pyrrhic or not, it will take stronger fare than this to keep either lady on top of the Hollywood heap.

And then there are some, such as Carrie Snodgress and Barbara Hershey, who, after promising beginnings, have given us all too little with which to determine whether or not their promise will be fulfilled. Carrie, a dedicated actress, actually deserted the screen just as her career was coming into flower in order to take a stage role at Los Angeles' prestigious, but ill-paying, Music Center; while Barbara, after her successes in Last Summer and The Baby Maker, has been distressingly quiescent save for her role in The Pursuit of Happiness, Columbia's tardy entry in the alienated-youth cycle. But things may be looking up for Barbara with her new starring role in Dealing.

Another recent absentee is lissome Sarah Miles, who was so impressive as the heroine of David Lean's overblown Ryan's Daughter but has done nothing onscreen since. Miss Miles, 28, had the benefit of a script shaped for her by her playwright husband, Robert Bolt, that permitted her to run the gamut from ecstasy to shameful degradation at the hands of Irish townfolk shocked by her flagrant infidelity to her schoolteacher husband. Her transports in the nude with a shell-shocked young British officer caused less consternation among audiences than at the Motion Picture Association, which gave the film an R rating. MGM, indignant at this insult to the revered David Lean, whose taste had gone unquestioned for decades, noisily withdrew from the association even after it altered its R to a GP--but quietly returned a few months later.

Warner Bros., understandably, raised no such hue and cry when Ken Russell's production of The Devils, starring Miss Miles' statuesque compatriot Vanessa Redgrave, received an X. The film, a stylishly erotic adaptation of the famed incident at Loudun, presented Vanessa as the humpbacked prioress of a 17th Century nunnery who comes to believe that she and her flock have been possessed by Satan and a host of lesser devils. A climax of sorts is achieved when, in an attempt to exorcise her demons, Vanessa is stripped and flagellated in full view of a leering audience; then a huge, bellowslike instrument filled with some hot and noxious brew is inserted into her vagina, presumably for purposes of purification. A far cry from Camelot and The Loves of Isadora.

Russell had first offered the role of this erotically obsessed nun to Glenda Jackson, who had worked for him previously in two of his earlier films and who, he thought, would have no inhibitions in partaking of the naked revels he envisioned for The Devils. But Miss Jackson did have her doubts about the part and for her next film chose instead John Schlesinger's Sunday Bloody Sunday, in which it became quickly apparent that nudity wasn't one of her reservations. Unfortunately, it also became evident that nudity was no longer one of her assets. The full, large-nippled breasts that popped so dramatically, almost three-dimensionally, from the screen in Women in Love no longer look their best. At one screening of Sunday, in fact, as she began to unbutton her blouse for the third or fourth time, an anguished male cried out, "No, no, leave it on!" Miss Jackson, who's been called--in England--"the intellectual's Raquel Welch," has subsequently admitted that it was a pregnancy that lent fullness to her breasts in the earlier picture; but unless she's prepared to undergo a new pregnancy for each film, Glenda had better keep her shirt on--or risk the danger of becoming "the intellectual's Mia Farrow." Actually, Miss Jackson's sexuality is expressed not in her body but in her feline green eyes, flaring nostrils and bold mouth; with these compelling features, she has been ill-advised to emphasize her less striking endowments.

Nor was glamorous Faye Dunaway--absent from the screen for almost a year--altogether well advised to make her comeback as the grimy-faced, foul-mouthed prostitute Kate Elder opposite Stacy Keach's Doc (Holliday, that is). Apart from her appearance as the oversexed wife of a Bible thumper in Little Big Man--a cameo performance in which she slyly introduces a 15-year-old Dustin Hoffman to the delights of sex, then returns later in the film as the madam of a frontier bordello--the chic and capable Miss Dunaway had contributed her blonde good looks to an incredible array of clinkers. She moved like a zombie as Kirk Douglas' mistress in The Arrangement and was still off in some strange world of her own in Puzzle of a Downfall Child, playing a freaked-out fashion model. But her Kate Elder at least served to confirm that the acting ability she displayed in Bonnie and Clyde has not disappeared.

There is a fine line between the plight of the actress who, like Faye, needs a great role to consolidate her position and that of the one who needs it to save her career. Many a young hopeful--hazel-eyed Katharine Ross is a prime example--has been catapulted to stardom on the basis of her appearance in a single hit (in her case, The Graduate), only to become mired down in a series of second-rate pictures (Hellfighters, Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here) or secondary roles (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid). Miss Ross needs desperately another Graduate to save her from television. But she is only one of many in similar straits. Sexy Jill St. John, an egghead with an hourglass figure, has been enhancing minor roles in minor films for the past decade. Her major role in the new James Bond movie, Diamonds Are Forever, may end the marking-time phase of her career. And Leigh Taylor-Young, after having been swallowed up by such large-scale disasters as The Adventurers and The Horsemen, is hoping devoutly that her role in the forthcoming The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight will put her foundering career back on the tracks.

Totally symptomatic is the fate of Raquel Welch, the number-one sexpot of last year. Probably no one has survived more mediocre movies than Raquel, and Myra Breckinridge was expected to be her step up to class (if not exactly classy) entertainment. Instead, it became one of 1970's biggest fiascos on every count--including Miss Welch's performance in the androgynous title role. More germane, though, was what happened in 20th Century-Fox's bookkeeping department. It was discovered that most of the films in which she had appeared have garnered few profits. Although she was eminently available when another company suggested her for the lead in one of its pictures, the director balked and insisted on an actress with a lesser name and more ability. The company backed down. Miss Welch, who recently filed for divorce from husband Patrick Curtis, is now filming a movie about roller-skating derbies, Warner Bros.' Kansas City Bomber. At this point in her career, it's a risky title.

Career risk is by no means confined to the ladies on this side of the water. Brigitte Bardot may still make headlines occasionally, especially when she changes boyfriends (which seems to happen every six months or so), but she makes movies with much less frequency. Last year she was seen briefly, and unsuitably, as a nun in Les Novices, and this year someone has dug up The Bear and the Doll for American distribution; but gone forever are the days when some 20 Bardot epics would be running simultaneously in Manhattan's art and skin-flick houses. Of the older and more firmly established Europeans, only Sophia Loren continues to command attention and respect. Now pushing 40, she has become decidedly more matronly in appearance and more conservative in her choice of roles--although there were sequences in The Priest's Wife that revealed that neither the temperament nor the talent has disappeared, while the ripening of her years has lent an increased sensuality to both her face and her figure. Elke Sommer and Ursula Andress--whose films have never been as good as their figures--are currently pinning their futures on the success of Baron Blood and Red Sun, respectively.

But even as the Brigittes reluctantly fade into the past, a new wave of European beauties has begun its welcome invasion of these shores. At the crest of it at the moment is Paris-born Dominique Sanda, who combines a delectably refined appearance with a flair for acting quite remarkable in a girl who has yet to celebrate her 21st birthday. Her entry into motion pictures came through a chance meeting with director Robert Bresson, who saw her as the ideal leading lady for his film Une Femme Douce. Critics hailed her performance when the film was unveiled at the 1969 New York Film Festival. There was more praise for her portrayal of a wayward Russian aristocrat in Maximilian Schell's adaptation of Turgenev's First Love--indeed, far more for Miss Sanda than for the film itself. But the picture that really established her with American audiences was Bernardo Bertolucci's brilliant adaptation of Alberto Moravia's The Conformist earlier this year. As the Lesbianish young wife of an exiled Italian professor, she exuded an eroticism intriguingly tinged with the decadence of the final years of Fascism before World War Two--particularly when dancing a sinuous tango with the luscious wife of the man the Fascists have sent to murder her husband. Her latest film, directed by the distinguished Vittorio De Sica, is The Garden of the Finzi Contini, the Italian entry at the recent San Francisco Film Festival. Already there are murmurs of "another Garbo."

Dominique Sanda's strikingly beautiful tango partner in The Conformist was Stefania Sandrelli, who may be remembered as Marcello Mastroianni's young girlfriend in Divorce--Italian Style. Then 16, Miss Sandrelli has appeared in a dozen films in the past decade, few of which have reached this country; they have, however, established her as one of the leading lights of the Italian cinema--a light that can only glow brighter after the international success of the Bertolucci film.

In much the same position is tall, leggy Florinda Bolkan, a girl who first attracted attention, of sorts, as the dance partner of Richard Burton at a Venice charity ball some four or five years ago. The interest of Italian producers was immediately whetted. Luchino Visconti cast her as the frightened prostitute visited by Helmut Berger in The Damned, after which came increasingly important roles, including a featured part in The Last Valley with Omar Sharif. But the film that finally focused international attention on this full-blown brunette is this year's award-winning Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, in which she plays the animalistic mistress of a cool chief of police who also happens to be a sexual pervert. Murdered by him early in the picture, she reappears repeatedly--and memorably--in his lustful imaginings. Built (as Investigation fully reveals) along the classic lines of such busty beauties of the Italian screen as Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida, Florinda would seem to be their most logical successor.

Pushing forward on the domestic front are at least a baker's dozen of attractive young ladies, all of them jockeying for the rail position in the sex-star sweepstakes. Probably in the lead at the moment is Laugh-In's graduate Goldie Hawn, who all but stole Cactus Flower out from under the expensive noses of such camera-wise veterans as Ingrid Bergman and Walter Matthau in her first film venture. Even less expected was the bewitching figure she exhibited to go along with her comically gamin face in There's a Girl in My Soup, in which she not only gave the redoubtable Peter Sellers a good run for the funny money but was infinitely better to look at.

Indeed, television has provided a proving ground, or at least a showcase, for many of the young lovelies who have begun to grace the larger screens. Fresh-faced Trish Van Devere worked on TV soap operas in Manhattan, as well as in several unmemorable off-Broadway plays, before being tapped for Where's Poppa? and, more recently, The Last Run. Buxom Lana Wood, Natalie's not-so-little sister, came up by way of TV's Dr. Kildare and Peyton Place series--not to mention a strong assist from Playboy. It was the eye-filling photo layout of Lana (together with samples of her poetry) in last April's issue that brought her the best role she's received to date--as Plenty O'Toole in the new James Bond thriller, Diamonds Are Forever.

Playboy has actually done more than its share to--forgive the expression--uncover as well as to advance new talent for the movies. Tall, leggy Lauren Hutton, with her blonde tresses and slightly convergent squint, had been a Bunny and a model before hopping onto Robert Redford's motorcycle in Little Fauss and Big Halsy and seducing priest Robert Forster in Pieces of Dreams. She's now cast as Marcello Mastroianni's co-star in May I Introduce Myself, Rocco Papaleo. Roger Vadim was so taken by the dusky charms--and impressive measurements--of another Playboy cottontail, Joyce Williams, a Bumper-Pool Bunny in the Los Angeles Playboy Club, that he featured her in his Pretty Maids All in a Row. Similarly, Playmate-Bunny Dolly Read, once at Playboy's London Club, caught the knowledgeable eye of producer-director Russ Meyer, who set her on the path to a film career by giving her a lead in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. She also caught the eye of Laugh-In's Dick Martin, who married her last September. Among the girls who have stepped from the centerfold into the cinema are Claudia Jennings, Connie Kreski, Cynthia Myers, Victoria Vetri, Sue Bernard and the Collinson twins. And Playboy's pictorial last May on Sarah Kennedy, a third cousin to the Kennedys, probably did more to help her burgeoning career than did her appearance in The Telephone Book, the movie that prompted the layout. Described as "a sexy Goldie Hawn," Sarah has just completed a new picture, Sammy Somebody.

Modeling, particularly high-fashion modeling, continues to provide an entry into the movies. Beautiful Jennifer O'Neill, born in Rio de Janeiro, was a model at 15 and a Vogue cover girl at 17. She began her film career with Alexander Singer's Glass Houses, in which she shared a group-encounter session--and the bed--of an older man with a charming lack of embarrassment. Because of releasing schedules, however, audiences saw her first, with considerably more decorum, opposite John Wayne in Rio Lobo and as the "older woman" in Summer of '42 who impulsively bestows herself on an adolescent boy.

Perhaps the least inhibited of the young models on the rise is willowy June Fairchild, who walked into Roger Vadim's office, while he was casting Pretty Maids, wearing a transparent dress--and nothing else. She got the part. "I was enchanted," Vadim reported later. "Sex without vulgarity delights me." He should know. And the most publicized of all the fashion models, Britain's diminutive Twiggy, will be making her film debut at the end of the year in Ken Russell's production of The Boy Friend. One can't help hoping she will have no nude scenes.

For most of these girls, the word star must be stretched a bit to apply. But all of them are hoping for the right break, the kind of overnight success won by Ali MacGraw in Love Story. More typical of the Hollywood saga, however, is the longer struggle of her co-star in that film, 30-year-old Ryan O'Neal. No sooner had Love Story hit the screen than the magazines began blossoming with O'Nealabilia. Glamour described him as "beautiful ... and talented." And Life, in its pontifical way, asserted that "O'Neal, with his blond good looks and the 'star presence' he emanates, has helped recapture more of the lost movie audience ... than any star since Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music."

And yet this "beautiful ... and talented" paragon with his "star presence" had been sitting on Hollywood's doorstep for a considerable while without producing any fever blisters. He had played Rodney Harrington in television's Peyton Place (where he met and married Leigh Taylor-Young). Then Warner Bros. co-starred O'Neal and his lissome bride in a sexy trifle called The Big Bounce, which promptly became known around the studio as The Big Bomb. And 20th Century-Fox fared no better when it cast him as an Olympian distance runner in The Games (scripted, coincidentally, by the then-unheralded Erich Segal); the film only added to that company's mounting deficit. Understandable, then, is the hesitation with which Paramount viewed his candidacy for the role of Oliver Barrett IV in its projected Love Story. He was tested for the part along with some 30 other aspirants and was rather grudgingly signed for the picture at a rock-bottom fee of $25,000. The studio concentrated its prerelease publicity bonfires on co-star MacGraw and author Segal (himself no mean publicist).

Now fortune's darling, Ryan has been inundated with scripts. His less-than-impressive appearance with William Holden in Wild Rovers was a deal consummated before the stunning impact of Love Story but his agreement to co-star with Barbra Streisand in a zany comedy, What's Up, Doc?, came after, and his fee for professional services has zoomed accordingly. While all this was happening, Leigh's career became bogged down in soggy sagas, and her marriage to O'Neal was, at last report, in a trial-separation phase. Meanwhile, the gossip columnists were busily reporting the new togetherness of Ryan and Barbra at the better movie premieres and plusher restaurants on both coasts. Were they a "hot item"? Barbra's explanation was disarmingly simple: "After all," she told a fan-magazine writer, "a superstar can't go out with just anybody."

The only other major male star to emerge in 1971 was Jack Nicholson, who would seem to be the least likely choice for a sex star of this or any other year. Although he claims his age is 34, his face is already seamed and haggard and his dark hair is thinning; in addition, his eyes are slightly crossed. Nevertheless, in 1971 his career skyrocketed. Not only did he star in Carnal Knowledge and the odd, offbeat A Safe Place, he also co-wrote and directed the controversial Drive, He Said. But his was no story of overnight success, even though he seemingly burst onto the screen as the sodden Southern liberal lawyer who rode along for a way with Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda in Easy Rider, and promptly copped an Oscar nomination. Devotees of American International Pictures' myriad bike films know better; Nicholson had previously donned the leather jacket and crash helmet for leading roles in such films as Hell's Angels on Wheels, Flight to Fury and Psych-Out. As early as 1960, he was playing the best friend of the alienated, mixed-up heroes of Too Soon to Love and Studs Lonigan (in which he got young Studs involved in a rape case). By the time Easy Rider came along, Nicholson was ready.

His complex performance as Bobby Dupea, the foot-loose, uncommitted scion of a talented family in Five Easy Pieces, gave further affirmation of his skills. Carnal Knowledge, in which Nicholson goes all the way from college jock to played-out, impotent rounder in his mid-40s, provided an even more multifaceted role. He steals Candice Bergen away from his innocent roommate, Arthur Garfunkel; shacks up with, then cold-bloodedly discards a zaftig Ann-Margret; and finally ends up paying for the professional pleasures offered by Rita Moreno. Similarly, in A Safe Place, he casually drops in on Tuesday Weld at four a.m., coolly dismisses her gentleman friend and just as coolly walks out after he has had his fun. Both films limn icily precise portraits of the egocentric American male that women's lib has been complaining about--and Nicholson played the roles with stunning veracity.

The characters Nicholson has delineated onscreen--the troubled loner, the intelligent cynic, the driven artist--are all overtones of his own personality. Tall, lean, a casual dresser and an intense conversationalist, Nicholson--who's been divorced for the past three years--is rarely found at Beverly Hills' swankier social affairs. He thinks of himself as "an old-fashioned character actor, not a sex star," and speaks of the quick upturn that his career has taken as "a coincidence of successful pictures." This coincidence permitted him this year to realize a dream of long standing, to direct his own film--and even though Drive, He Said was a box-office failure, he still wants to try again. With Carnal Knowledge merrily clicking the turnstiles, his next chance may not be far off--particularly if he'll consent to act in as well as direct that future film.

Nicholson is by no means alone in his directorial ambitions. Clint Eastwood, who--almost unbelievably--is the top box-office star in the country this year, according to the industry's trade papers, now heads his own production unit at Universal Pictures. After such appropriately titled low-budgeted spaghetti Westerns as A Fistful of Dollars, for which he received little salary but a big percentage of the profits, had spiraled into a bankful of dollars all bearing his name, Eastwood decided to shake the sand out of his sombrero and forge a new, more provocative image. In The Beguiled, for example, he appears as a Union soldier who, wounded in the Civil War, is harbored in a mansion full of Southern schoolmistresses and their charges, most of whom he succeeds in seducing. When his profligacy is discovered, the belles, understandably miffed, saw off his wounded leg and feed him poison mushrooms. Eastwood, as it turned out, performed better than the picture did; but undaunted, Clint next took on the triple chores of producer, director and star for Play Misty for Me, in which he appears as a disc jockey plagued by an adoring fan.

Blue-eyed, graying Paul Newman, who rivals Eastwood at the box office--and who has remained near the top of the Hollywood heap since his entry into pictures in 1954--is also seeking new stature as a director-producer. Newman's sensitive handling of Rachel, Rachel, which won his wife, Joanne Woodward, an Academy Award nomination in 1968, suggested that he could hold his own with the best of them. Undeterred by the flop of his WUSA, Newman was in the midst of production on Sometimes a Great Notion when he and director Richard Colla had what the trade calls "artistic differences." Without flinching, Newman simply took over the director's reins and finished the film to his own satisfaction.

Among the younger stars following in the directorial footsteps of Newman, et al., are those two easy riders, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper. Close to a mythic subculture hero after Easy Rider, Fonda opted to direct and spent a year and a half turning out a bemused little Western, The Hired Hand, with himself in the title role. Not much emerged from the film except Peter's striking resemblance in both face and voice to his famous father. At one time a firebrand enthusiastically carrying the torch for the drug culture of which he had made himself a champion and spokesman, in more recent years young Fonda has been no less eloquent in putting it down. Ecology has become his new concern, and he and his wife, Susan, now live quietly with their two children in a hideaway in the Santa Monica Mountains. For the moment, the film career of the lanky, appealing young actor seems to have ground to a halt.

This may also be true of his sidekick Dennis Hopper, although the picture on which Hopper slaved for more than two years, The Last Movie, is just going into release as this is written. Two years, nevertheless, is a long time for any rising star to be absent from the screen, even with the more than ample magazine and newspaper coverage of his unorthodox antics on location in Peru. Reports filtered back of communal loveins and air perpetually heavy with the smell of pot--although accompanying this was a strong sense of Hopper's commitment to his convoluted script, which is, on one level, the story of a movie wrangler seeking his fortune in a foreign land and, on another, the clash between the American myth and a primitive religion.

Hopper, who likes to think of himself as a film maker first and an actor second, is also a highly skilled still photographer; in addition, he writes, paints and sculpts and over the years has acquired a collection of modern art (mostly pop) valued at $250,000. Unabashedly drawn to pretty women, Hopper has been married twice: first to beautiful Brooke Hayward, the daughter of producer Leland Hayward and Margaret Sullavan, then for a brief time in 1970 to rock singer Holly Michelle Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas. His life style, as revealed in the recent biographical movie The American Dreamer, is obviously not conducive to marriage. Almost superstitiously devoted to the memory of his close friend the late James Dean, Hopper sustains that earlier image of the sensitive, rebellious young man who needs to call his soul his own. By the time this appears in print, readers will know whether director Hopper has succeeded where his friends Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson have failed.

Happily, the widening opportunities for moving from the star's dressing room to the director's chair are no longer limited to white stars. When the scheduled director of Buck and the Preacher unexpectedly resigned, Sidney Poitier was able to take over without missing a beat. The film, jointly produced by Poitier and Harry Belafonte, stars both of them, along with Ruby Dee. Buck and the Preacher should help Poitier shed the almost antiseptic image he's borne in films ever since Lilies of the Field and should give Belafonte the new status he's seeking as a serious actor.

An even more impressive display of black power was unleashed by Melvin Van Peebles, the writer, director, producer, star and composer of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. Using the profits from last year's Watermelon Man, which he coproduced and directed, Van Peebles was able to secure complete financing for Sweet Sweetback himself, and thus empowered to make it to his own liking--which may be why, as star, we see him shacking up with one beauteous black chick after another as his chase story unfolds. A self-avowed black militant, Van Peebles first gained attention with Story of a Three Day Pass, produced in France. Invited by Columbia to direct Watermelon Man, he had an immediate, well-publicized disagreement with his star, Godfrey Cambridge, over the picture's title. Cambridge felt it was demeaning to blacks and claims Van Peebles assured him that the title would be changed. It wasn't, and Cambridge took every opportunity to express his indignation. Less publicized were Van Peebles' squabbles with his coproducer, John Bennett. At one point in their acrimonious relationship, Van Peebles reportedly said to Bennett, "You do that and I'll kill you." Observers--and Bennett himself--were pretty sure he meant it. In any case, there were no such differences over Sweet Sweet-back--and the picture rolled up stupendous grosses, particularly in the black communities.

Black audiences also made a surprise hit out of Gordon Parks's Shaft--and not so much because Parks is a black director but because equally black Richard Roundtree, in the title role, projected a commanding sexuality seldom seen on the screen since the palmier days of Humphrey Bogart. Cast as a Manhattan-based private eye caught up in a war between a Harlem gang and the Mafia, Roundtree swaggered, shot, seduced and spoke up to Whitey as no movie black had ever done before. Unlike Van Peebles, Parks permitted a grudging friendship between Roundtree and a white detective. It is a film with which both white and black can empathize and may well lead to a series for Roundtree.

As the year began, one of the hottest stars in the industry was bushy-headed Elliott Gould. (As a matter of fact, his frequent nude scenes revealed that he was bushy all over.) Gould was apparently just the new male personality the public wanted; his puckish portrayal of Ted in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice had produced roars of approval throughout the land. Next he was a smash in M*A*S*H, from which he rushed headlong into four more films. Then the accounting departments began to leak the bad news. Getting Straight had barely squeaked into the black; Little Murders, despite excellent reviews, was unable to recoup its low cost; Move didn't; and I Love My ... Wife went unloved at the box office. News of a more distressing sort came from the set of a newly begun film, A Glimpse of Tiger. Gould and director Anthony Harvey were not getting along. Gould's co-star, the gifted and elfin Kim Darby, had been reduced to tears, so it was said, by Elliott's oafish behavior. Only a week into production, the film was halted, then canceled entirely. Gould was reported to be in Europe, resting from the rigors of a perhaps too strenuous program. There were rumors of a drug problem. He had openly admitted his fondness for pot in his Playboy Interview it was hinted that he had experimented further. Before the sudden cessation of his starring activity, Gould had been tapped by the prestigious Ingmar Bergman for his first English-speaking film, The Touch. But stacked against such Swedish pros as Bibi Andersson and Max von Sydow, Gould appeared to be a stumbling amateur. Nor was the film one of Bergman's best. Still and all, at 33, Gould is hardly a has-been and next year may well see a renascence of his career.

For a time, Gould's M*A*S*H buddy Donald Sutherland looked as if he were going to be equally, and just as unprofitably, busy. After the reasonably popular Kelly's Heroes, Sutherland went into a dual role as peasant and aristocrat in the farcical but not widely patronized Start the Revolution Without Me, then fought in vain to overcome his material in the pretentious Alex in Wonderland. Alex was enough to discourage all but the most enthusiastic Sutherland fans. But then, after a period of inactivity, he popped back in the title role of Klute, in which his professional performance was outdone only by an even more professional performance by Jane Fonda as an expensive tart.

Robert Redford, unlike Gould and Sutherland, suffered more from underexposure than from overexposure. After his signal success with Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Redford began to choose his properties with more than ordinary care. His love of sports dictated Downhill Racer and Little Fauss and Big Halsy his social concerns drew him to Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here but those films were released in 1969 and 1970, and this year he's been so selective that the Redford name has been absent from movie marquees. By the time this issue is on the stands, his latest, Hot Rock, may be in circulation; it's being heralded as a comedy thriller, with a plum role as an ex-con for Redford and an equally good one for the capable George Segal as his confederate. And Warner Bros.' announcement earlier this year that Redford and Newman would once more team in a film--this one based on the true-life experiences of two New York policemen fighting corruption within their ranks--was made to the accompaniment of publicity drumbeats in the style usually reserved for the merging of two great corporations. No wonder; the terms of the deal were rumored to be $1,500,000 in cash, split by Newman and Redford as co-stars, plus 22-1/2 percent of the gross to be shared by their companies.

The smiling, smoldering Warren Beatty has also been conspicuous by his absence. Indeed, after cleaning up with Bonnie and Clyde in 1967, he has lent his presence to only two pictures--the unfortunate The Only Game in Town in 1970 (for which mistake he was reputedly compensated with $750,000) and this year's McCabe & Mrs. Miller, in which he participated with a heavy percentage of the gross. Offscreen, of course, Beatty was far from inactive, as the gossip columnists kept reminding us. His freewheeling romance with Julie Christie had him jetting from one fashionable watering hole to another on practically every continent. His latest venture took him to Hamburg for a new Richard Brooks picture cryptically titled $--possibly because the $ earned by McCabe fell substantially below anticipation.

Absent, too, for much of the year was Jon Voight, whose electric emergence in Midnight Cowboy still keeps audiences looking forward to some reiteration of his initial impact. The Revolutionary, filmed in England by Paul Williams, the director who gave Voight his first chance in Out of It, didn't quite do it. (Neither did Out of It, released after the success of Midnight Cowboy.) Now, from a plethora of scripts, Voight has chosen for his next film the sad tale of a small-town boxer, The All-American Boy again, the results should be in shortly.

Michael Caine's sagging status was boosted this year on the strength of a single performance, as a tough, swaggering gangster on vengeful prowl in the British-made Get Carter but the greatest surprise return was that registered by Sean Connery, whose career had drooped badly after his withdrawal from the James Bond series. The cool reception accorded such films as Shalako and The Molly Maguires suggested that the public wanted Connery as Bond or not at all. And then came The Anderson Tapes, an extremely well-made and intelligently cast example of the caper genre, and Connery was back in business. Advance word on Diamonds Are Forever, scheduled for holiday release, indicates that Connery's star may burn brighter than ever now that he's back in glittering Bondage.

Hoping for a similarly successful return is Marlon Brando, seen (briefly) in Candy and (forgettably) in The Night of the Following Day. Traditionally, fans whose idols have been off the screen too long don't merely forget, they find other idols to worship. But in Brando's case, considering the splendid reviews that greeted his performance as the mysterious gardener Quint in The Nightcomers, loosely based on Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, screened at the Venice Film Festival, this hardly seems likely. Reports out of New York during the shooting of his highly publicized next venture, The Godfather, spoke of a new Brando: cooperative, considerate, concerned--and punctual. He seemed personally convinced that, after a long series of mediocre pictures, The Godfather could return him to the front ranks of male stardom, where he clearly belongs. Whether Brando's portrait of a Mafia capo will also return him to the front ranks of male sex stars remains to be seen.

The distinction between star as sex symbol and star as skilled performer is frequently blurred. Take, for example, the saturnine George C. Scott, an old pro who keeps the wickets turning and the wire services churning with such incidents as his refusal to accept the Oscar he so fully earned with his indepth portrait of Patton. Scott out-Rathboned old Basil in They Might Be Giants, playing a lovably paranoid judge who imagines himself to be Sherlock Holmes, then set out to out-Bogart Humphrey as a onetime criminal attempting a final haul in The Last Run. He came out of The Last Run with more than just critical acclaim. Married, divorced, then remarried to actress Colleen Dewhurst (who played a small role as a Portuguese prostitute in Run), Scott began to take a serious interest in his youthful leading lady, the lovely Trish Van Devere, separated from his wife yet again and returned to New York with Trish.

Another unlikely sex star is Walter Matthau, undoubtedly one of the most important actors to emerge in recent years, with a record of highly profitable pictures unparalleled in the industry. But the bilious face, the gravelly voice, the shambling, stoop-shouldered gait are hardly the accouterments of the standard matinee idol. As Rin-Tin-Tin once proved, one can be popular and profitable without necessarily being a sex star. Indeed, an actor can appear in a whole series of sexually oriented films without having any of their sexuality rub off on him. A case in point is Richard Benjamin, who leaped toward stardom in Goodbye, Columbus, drove Carrie Snodgress to desperation in Diary of a Mad Housewife, seduced a wide swath of young ladies in The Steagle and spied lasciviously on shapely neighbors in The Marriage of a Young Stockbroker. For all his carnal adventures, he remains quintessentially the neurasthenic, overly mothered young Jewish intellectual of Goodbye, Columbus--and, hence, the inevitable choice of writer-director-producer Ernest Lehman for the masturbatory antihero of Portnoy's Complaint, now in production. And there's that erstwhile Graduate, Dustin Hoffman, who aged from 12 to 121 in the enormously successful Little Big Man and from 20 to 40 in Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? Already overage when he played collegian Ben Braddock, Hoffman, now 34, remains essentially a fine character actor--although the characters he plays invariably have a left-handed, boyish kind of sexual appeal.

A fine young actor who does seem to possess the attributes for sex stardom is Stacy Keach, now on view as Doc. Keach, who came to Hollywood from the stage, had the lead role in the critical success (but box-office mediocrity) The Traveling Executioner--and a cameo part in Brewster McCloud, which drew good notices for Stacy but mixed reviews for director Robert (M*A*S*H) Altman. If Keach connects with the right role in the right film, he could be dynamite. Other up-and-comers include John Phillip Law, the untiring personification of The Love Machine Christopher Jones, the shell-shocked lover of Ryan's Daughter the arresting A1 Pacino, who stormed the screen as the drug-addicted Bobby of The Panic in Needle Park and is costarring with Brando in The Godfather and Timothy Dalton, the brooding Heathcliff in the remake of Wuthering Heights.

Desperately wooing the youth market, film makers have looked even to recording stars as possible tickets to box-office success. It worked last year--temporarily--with Mick Jagger; in 1971, Arthur Garfunkel, who parlayed his minor role in Mike Nichols' Catch-22 into a leading one in Nichols' Carnal Knowledge, would seem to be the prime example of the vinyl-to-celluloid story. Folk-rock singer James Taylor also came on strong in the racing hobohemia of Two-Lane Blacktop, and gravel-voiced country-and-western virtuoso Kris Kristofferson gave a good account of himself as a pot-pushing minstrel in Cisco Pike (which had previously been called Dealer and may well be changed again to Keep Off the Grass).

On the European scene, only Jean-Louis Trintignant seems to have emerged as a likely candidate for superstardom. Indeed, after his performances in My Night at Maud's, Z and The Conformist, all highly cerebral enterprises, and his delightful portrayal of the brains behind a kidnaping gang in Claude Lelouch's seriocomic The Crook, it seems that Trintignant can play just about anything--and also that just about every second picture that appears from Italy or France these days has him in it. Such formerly glamorous imports as Britain's Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole and Egypt's Omar Sharif have held up less well of late. It did seem passing strange that so virile an actor as Burton should impersonate a raging queen in Staircase, a $6,000,000 fiasco. But to follow that with his portrait of a homicidal homosexual sadist in a cheap thriller called Villain smacks less of sadism than of masochism.

In their latest outings, both O'Toole and Sharif have gone back to the semi-sexless image of their first hit, Lawrence of Arabia. The difference is that in Lawrence there were no women to provide romantic relief. But in The Horsemen, filmed in Yugoslavia by the gifted John Frankenheimer, who seemed rather badly off his form, Sharif was so passionately attached to his mettlesome Arabian steed that he all but ignored the equally mettlesome and altogether willing gypsy girl played by Leigh Taylor-Young. And in Murphy's War, O'Toole--instead of pursuing the only interesting female in sight (Sian Phillips, his real-life wife)--took off after a German submarine by land, sea and air, even though World War Two was already over. Is that the behavior of a sex star? America's Steve McQueen was afflicted by the same indifference to women when, in Le Mans, he spent most of his time tooling around and around the race course instead of pursuing Elga Andersen. His Porsche was admittedly a splendid job, but so was Elga.

Though the elegant Marcello Mastroianni, it seems, is being rapidly replaced by Trintignant, you can't accuse him of remaining idle. He made four films this year--The Priest's Wife with Sophia Loren, Diamonds for Breakfast with Rita Tushingham, Le Voyeur with Virna Lisi, and his first American production, It Only Happens to Others, with lovely Catherine Deneuve--from which he's expected to earn a paltry $2,000,000. "But I am bored," he confessed in an interview with Rex Reed. "I am fed up with life. Nothing is amusing." This attitude has been showing up increasingly in his performances; but Reed points out that Mastroianni--although married--has been consoling himself less apathetically with two of the world's most beautiful women, Faye Dunaway and, more recently, Mlle. Deneuve. So his life can't be all that empty.

In the same interview, however, Mastroianni ponders aloud the possibility that he may not always be rich and famous, and this is something of more universal concern among his peers. Most of our own senior citizens--men like John Wayne, Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, James Stewart, Gregory Peck--have more than enough salted away for a rainy day, but there is always that moment when the money stops, when their star finally sets. Happily, in the course of their long careers, all these men have become more than stars; they have become actors. They have learned how to cope with the cranky mechanisms of camera and microphone and to project more than their own presence. They have learned how to create characters. And perhaps that is the real difference between being a star and being an actor. The actor builds a whole new person, while what the star projects is essentially his own personality. And if that personality is sexy enough, he becomes a sex star and lives happily--if not ever after, then at least until the reviews and receipts for his next film.