Sex Stars of 1972

To judge from the films of 1972, the women's liberation movement is having a greater impact out in the audience than it is onscreen: The biggest, hottest, most potent sex stars of the year were predominantly male. It was not ever thus. Sex stars have traditionally been female, the words conjuring up such sugarplum visions as Raquel Welch, Marilyn Monroe, Brigitte Bardot or, from the more distant past, Greta Garbo and Rita Hayworth. Nor was it merely male chauvinism that held these heavenly bodies firmly in place; women liked them, too. Some see this year's relative paucity of distaff stars as the result of the libbers' often strident objections to the use of sisters as sex symbols; it seems more likely to us that female movie fans today feel freer to express openly their admiration for a sexy man.

Whatever the reason, the male star as sex symbol is at the moment very much in the ascendancy, with more new faces--and bodies--clamoring for attention than at any time in the past two decades. Symptomatically, it might have been merely a publicity gimmick when Cosmopolitan, in its April 1972 issue, presented a nude Burt Reynolds (hand neatly hiding his genitals) as its premiere centerfold. But the gimmick paid off handsomely; not only was the issue completely sold out but the centerfold itself has become a collector's item.

The editors of Cosmo were astute in singling out the virile, muscular Reynolds for their pages. A product of television's Hawk and Dan August series, Reynolds had been an All-Southern Conference star halfback for Florida State University, with a contract to (text continued on page 226)Sex Stars of 1972(continued from page 207) turn pro with the Baltimore Colts. An automobile accident changed all that, and he was forced to take up his second love, acting. His first performance, in Palm Beach Junior College's production of Outward Bound, won him the 1958 Florida Drama Award and a scholarship to New York's Hyde Park Playhouse. Graduation took him to the New York City Center's revival of Mister Roberts, with Charlton Heston, and his first of many TV contracts--a role in the Chicago-based M Squad series. Moving to the Coast, Reynolds remained in television with continuing roles in Riverboat and as an Indian blacksmith in Gunsmoke--which was typecasting, since he is part Cherokee.

Gradually, the movies began to beckon Reynolds, who won increasingly important parts in such films as 100 Rifles, Sam Whiskey and Skullduggery. But though the roles may have been important, the pictures weren't. The breakthrough came this year, when United Artists gave him top billing (over Raquel Welch) as a tough cop in Fuzz, followed almost immediately by the release of one of the most engrossing action films of 1972, a superbly cinematic adaptation of James Dickey's Deliverance. As a Southern city man with a wild taste for adventure, Reynolds sets out with three pals for a weekend canoe trip down the churning white waters of Georgia's Cahulawassee River. It is a trip to disaster. One canoeist is lost in the rapids. Two are captured by mountaineers, who bugger one, torture the other. Reynolds shoots one of the mountain men with a bow and arrow, which makes him a murderer. And the other mountain man is killed by fellow canoeist Jon Voight when Reynolds is injured after his canoe goes out of control. It is no small credit to Reynolds' performance that much of the film's incredible dynamism dissolves the moment he is put out of commission.

Meanwhile, after a sell-out engagement in Chicago in a revival of The Rainmaker, Reynolds and Columbia Pictures are racing to complete yet another tough-cop story, Shamus, before the end of the year, with sensuous Dyan Cannon as co-star. Offscreen, his co-star has been the sprightly Dinah Shore, who has demonstrated her willingness to follow him on almost any location jaunt--including the Brooklyn and Manhattan sites for Shamus--as most of the nation's gossip columnists have duly noted. Reynolds makes his home on a ranch in Jupiter, Florida, originally built in 1923 by Al Capone as a gangster hideout. The chances are that, with the current demand for his services--including substitute hosting on The Tonight Show--Reynolds will have precious little opportunity to hide out there himself in the foreseeable future.

When it comes to proven ability at packing theaters, though, Reynolds--and everybody else--takes a back seat to rugged Clint Eastwood. A graduate of television's Rawhide, then of such immensely profitable spaghetti Westerns as A Fistful of Dollars and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Eastwood was named male star of the year by the National Association of Theater Owners and "the world's leading box-office attraction" by Time magazine. All this despite the fact that the tall, laconic, squinty-eyed Eastwood is nobody's ideal actor; and his first attempt at directing--Play Misty for Me--made no one think of a second coming of Welles.

Typically Eastwood is his most recent film, Joe Kidd, produced by his own Malpaso company. In it he plays, as is his wont, an outsider: the man in the middle who gets shot at from both sides. Shot, beaten, tortured, he remains tightlipped through it all--but eventually hits back six times as hard. At the climax of Joe Kidd, Eastwood drives a steam engine off its tracks and plows it through half a town, coming to rest in a saloon where some of his former persecutors have gathered; he guns them down in short order. As one critic observed of Eastwood's previous financial blockbuster Dirty Harry, "His particular genius is an infinite capacity for taking pain." And, he might have added, for dishing it out.

Coming up fast on Eastwood may be the even more rugged Charles Bronson, classed as the top-ranking international star of the year by one publication. Branson's craggy features are not exactly unfamiliar on the American screen; he has played some 80 roles since making his debut in U. S. S. Teakettle in 1951. But the preponderance of these have been heavies, gangsters, Indians or brutal convicts. Instead of ending up with the girl, he usually ended up with a bullet in his gut. Oddly enough, a change of venue markedly altered this dire fate. Considered a superstar by the French (as well as by the Japanese and the South Americans), he began to receive offers in France that allowed him to play sympathetic, even romantic leads--as in Adieu l'Ami and particularly in Rider on the Rain, a chiller that enjoyed moderate success in this country as well. Not coincidentally, both films by which he is represented on the screen this year, Chalo's Land and Red Sun, were made in Europe, with Spain doubling for the American West. But if Bronson is once more an Indian in the one and a bandit in the other, his bad-guy days are apparently over. As the song goes, "When you're hot, you're hot."

Probably the hottest new star of the year, however, is the dark, intense Al Pacino, who, after a single appearance in last year's The Panic in Needle Park, was suddenly catapulted to fame as the most intelligent, and most ruthless, of the second-generation Corleones in The Godfather. A product of the New York theater, Pacino studied with Herbert Berghof and at the Actors Studio before winning attention in such off-Broadway--and off-off-Broadway--attractions as The Indian Wants the Bronx (which also won him an Obie Award). The following year, he made his Broadway debut in Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie? and won a Tony. Needle Park came next. Critics at the time noted his strong physical resemblance to Dustin Hoffman and wondered aloud whether this might be detrimental to Pacino's career. After The Godfather, the greater risk would seem to be Hoffman's. Only 32, a moody and reclusive young man, Pacino made a point of declining the film offers that poured in with the release of The Godfather, electing to work with a repertory group in Boston--before, at last, signing to star with Gene Hackman in Warner's forthcoming Scarecrow. Meanwhile, Paramount is readying Godfather II, and if Paramount president Frank Yablons has his way--which he usually does--no one but Pacino will play the title role.

The record for turning down job offers out Hollywood way is currently held by Robert Redford, who has often stated that as long as the money holds out, he has no intention of working on pictures that don't interest him personally. This year, with two major movies in distribution--The Candidate and Jeremiah Johnson--he can probably afford to be choosier than ever. Each film, in its own way, is typical of the man. Redford was fascinated by The Candidate's exposition of the way that politics, especially in this age of television overexposure, can transform an earnest, idealistic liberal into a cynical cog in the political machine. Jeremiah Johnson, which won kudos when it was premiered at the Cannes film festival last May, is a true survival story, based on the exploits of a pioneer who roamed the Carolina mountains about 100 years ago. Redford's own devotion to mountain climbing, hunting and skiing has become well known--particularly since his purchase of some 2400 acres of land near Provo, Utah, which he's turned into a year-round sports resort called Sundance. His permanent home (with wife and three children) is on a mountaintop about 45 miles out of Provo.

Redford's career is a classic study in upward mobility. After attending the University of Colorado, he took off for more than a year to study the paintings in the great museums of Europe and to develop his own talents with the brush. Returning to the United States in 1958, he enrolled in Brooklyn's famed Pratt (continued on page 280)Sex Stars of 1972(continued from page 226) Institute to continue his studies, with some vague idea of becoming an art director. To further this interest, he also enrolled in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. A year later, he was an actor, making his Broadway debut in Tall Story. With Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park, he became the theater's most sought-after light-comedy leading man. It was the movie version of Barefoot in the Park, in which he played a squarish lawyer momentarily converted to Jane Fonda's blithe bohemia, that established Redford as a negotiable film personality. His personal magnetism was reaffirmed in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which many critics felt Redford stole completely away from his affable partner, Paul Newman. Next on his agenda: The Way We Were, based on Arthur Laurents' semiautobiographical novel about the personal toll of black-listing on a successful Hollywood writer. Barbra Streisand will co-star.

Another actor who, like Redford, insists on choosing his roles less for their box-office appeal than for their meaningfulness to himself is Jon Voight. After rocketing to stardom as the rangy Texan who expected to make it in Manhattan as a prize stud in 1969's Midnight Cowboy, Voight had seemingly plummeted right back to oblivion. Now, as Burt Reynolds' tall blond co-star in Deliverance, he's back in the public eye. In the first half of the picture, he is a calm, pipe-smoking fellow, totally shadowed by the powerful Reynolds character. But when his friend breaks a leg shooting the rapids, Voight takes over--becoming infinitely more interesting, complex and energetic.

Voight's time during the past two years has been principally swallowed up by his fight for what he considers the integrity of his other current film, The All American Boy. Shot in 1970, it was written and directed by novelist Charles Eastman, whose first cut was almost three and a half hours long; Warner Bros, eliminated its ideological points and trimmed it to a tidier 90 minutes. Voight interceded and--some say at the cost of making future picture commitments to Warner's--got the negative back to Eastman, who turned in a third version. Whichever print the public sees, it's a good bet that Voight's stripping for the boxing ring--and for a steamy, all-nude bedroom and shower sequence with blonde E. J. Peaker--will demonstrate a sex appeal not too apparent in his previous pictures.

If sex were not so clearly topic A in his fertile brain, and if he had not cast himself in two roguish roles this year, Woody Allen would hardly qualify as a sex star. But it is, and he did: In Play It Again, Sam, he's a horny divorcee, and in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)--a title guaranteed to overtax every marquee in the country except that at Radio City Music Hall, where it will never play--he portrays a ubiquitous inquiring reporter. Allen has behind him a solid record of successes in films, theater, recordings, night clubs, books and magazines. In all of them, the character he plays is identical--the cringing, frustrated inmate of a body that is inadequate to the superb erotic imaginings of his mind. Allen's the antithesis of the tough-guy image of Eastwood and Bronson--the cerebral as opposed to the purely physical. But his special appeal is that he makes it all hilariously funny.

The fact that you don't have to be a pretty boy to be a sex star was first demonstrated in the Thirties, when actors like Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Spencer Tracy and even Victor McLaglen emerged as superstars despite their obvious lack of pulchritude. They were essentially character actors, but since the characters they played were generally more dynamic, more complex and more human than those essayed by such collarad types as Robert Taylor or Tyrone Power, their following was prodigious. In recent years, the not-so-handsome-hero category has been inhabited mainly by Lee Marvin and James Coburn; lately, Bronson, Gene Hackman and George C. Scott (and, on television, Peter Falk as well) are climbing aboard. Certainly, Branson's detective in Rider on the Rain was strikingly reminiscent of Bogey--trench coat, slouch hat and all. Similarly, the characters so vigorously portrayed by Scott--the doctor who fears he might be impotent in The Hospital and the tough cop who can't face retirement in The New Centurions--are roles that might easily have fallen to Cagney or Tracy during the Thirties.

For Scott, the film that transformed him from character actor into star was Patton--a unique achievement. His well-publicized refusal of an Oscar for Patton, his equally well-publicized on-again, off-again marriage to actress Colleen Dewhurst and his even more widely publicized fourth wedding, to Trish Van Devere, with whom he'd been playing house ever since they appeared together in The Last Run--all have served to transform a craggy-faced middle-aged actor into one of the most intriguing top stars of the day.

The same twist of fate--one big role--served to propel Hackman into the upper echelons of stardom, although with far fewer previous credits than Scott. His work in Bonnie and Clyde and I Never Sang for My Father established Hackman as an actor of considerable range and ability (he received Academy nominations for both), but neither performance prepared audiences for his explosive "Popeye" Doyle in The French Connection, which did earn him the Oscar. As the edgy, implacable detective, he brought back to the screen a kind of larger-than-life energy and intensity not seen since the palmiest days of Jimmy Cagney. By the time this appears, he should also be visible as a tough, determined priest in The Poseidon Adventure, which details the last hours of a doomed ocean liner. Of the younger generation, James Caan, the quick-tempered, muscular Sonny of The Godfather, and Malcolm McDowell, the mainspring of Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, have both managed to establish their star quality with a single film, despite the fact that each had appeared in a good many pictures and television shows before the right role came along.

Among the several who made it big last year, only that ebullient Adonis Ryan O'Neal managed to retain his status--and that primarily because director Peter Bogdanovich had the insight to remove him from the lachrymose languors of Love Story and recast his image in the shape of that able farceur of yore, Cary Grant. What's Up, Doc? was a frank, freewheeling adaptation of those screwball comedies of the Thirties (with a special nod toward Howard Hawks's memorable Bringing Up Baby) and, while no one was ready to claim that the youthful O'Neal had assumed the mantle of the old master, the change of pace (especially coming after the calamitous Wild Rovers) did his career a world of good. It was a popular film; and if most of its patrons had come to worship at the Streisand shrine, many of them remained to praise O'Neal. A volatile, hedonistic young man who talks volubly of balling and getting high, drives expensive cars and likes to keep in condition for athletic movie stunts, O'Neal is a bundle of contradictions. But not an untalented bundle. Before the year is over, he will have had another chance to prove his comedic gifts in The Thief Who Came to Dinner, followed by a Hawks-cum-Bogdanovich Western, Paper Moon.

"A year ago," begins the studio bio on Richard Roundtree, with more than usual candor, "few people outside Richard Roundtree's family knew he existed." The reason was simple. Whenever a black actor was needed for a major role in a picture, the call automatically went out for Sidney Poitier. Roundtree himself--a former linebacker for Southern Illinois, fashion model for black magazines and actor in New York's Negro Ensemble Company--had never made a movie before he tried out for MGM's Shaft. Nevertheless, he was selected from more than 200 men who turned up for the auditions, and the film immediately established him as one of the most promising of the new faces of 1971. Again, it was a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Somehow, the black audience--which surely had been there all along--began to assert itself. A year earlier, black director Gordon Parks had missed the mark with his sensitive--perhaps too sensitive--The Learning Tree. In Shaft, he gave that same audience a hard-hitting, no-holds-barred melodrama in which the central character, a private eye (Roundtree), took no crap from anybody, black or white--especially white. And the black audiences around the country ate it up. This year, in Shaft's Big Score, Roundtree has resoundingly reaffirmed his popularity, with Embassy and Charlie One-Eye yet to come.

Big Jim Brown, back in the Sixties the number-two Negro star (after Poitier), had been virtually invisible during the black-movie boom of the past two years--because, he says, he was black-listed. "I've seen the letter that was circulated among the producers in Hollywood, telling them why I ought to be kept out of pictures," Brown told one interviewer. The football Hall of Famer's offscreen brawls and womanizing had won him headlines, but lost him script lines, and he was forced to go to Mexico, enlist outside financing and shoot Slaughter before American International could be convinced to market it. Slaughter, in which Brown co-stars with Playmate Stella Stevens, was followed by Black Gunn, pairing the muscular ex-gridiron hero with Brenda Sykes. Both films are doing well, and it looks as if Brown's long dry spell at the box office is ended.

There are some actors--but not many--who don't have to make a film for an entire year or more to retain their eminence. Warren Beatty, for example, prided himself when he was working on Bonnie and Clyde as being "the only really bankable star in the business who is under 30." Five years later, Beatty is considerably over 30; but his presence in a film--as in Richard Brooks's $--makes it "bankable." So does Dustin Hoffman's, as demonstrated when he played the introspective mathematical genius of Sam Peckinpah's hugely successful Straw Dogs. A question arises, though. When the crowds show up, as they definitely did for Little Big Man and Straw Dogs, is it for Hoffman or for the vehicle? And where were they when he needed them for Who Is Harry Kellerman, etc.? The question remains problematical in the case of Straw Dogs, but perhaps an answer will be reached with the forthcoming Until Divorce Separates Us.

There was a time when the name Marlon Brando was a fiscal guarantee far more potent than that of either Beatty or Hoffman. But the veteran Brando's career seemed inexplicably on the decline right through the Sixties. Mutiny on the Bounty lost MGM a fortune; Bedtime Story occupied the second half of double bills from the moment of its release; Morituri was such a disaster that 20th Century-Fox promptly changed its title so that unwary moviegoers wouldn't link it to any picture they might have read about. Some critics admired his work in Reflections in a Golden Eye and The Night comers, but audiences stayed away in droves. To win the title role in The Godfather, Brando did what, for a major star, was unthinkable. He went into the full make-up of Don Vito Corleone and submitted to a screen test so that Paramount's executives might be convinced he was right for the role. He was right (to the tune of more than $ 1,000,000 in his percentage of the picture), and so were they. Brando's presence lent the film a stature and a solidity that could not have come from a lesser actor.

Although Sidney Poitier's remarkable career never quite hit Brando's heights, neither did it sink to Brando's depths. Even so, for every Lilies of the Field, To Sir, with Love and In the Heat of the Night, there was a Bedford Incident, a Duel at Diablo and a Brother John. Like any hardy perennial, Poitier needed a sprinkling of successes to resuscitate his wilting reputation. This year has been a fairly good one for him. The Organization, coming early, cast him as a clever, compassionate cop working to save the members of a youth gang being framed by the San Francisco Syndicate. Buck and the Preacher, in which he co-starred with Harry Belafonte, presented Poitier as a former Union cavalryman dedicated to leading ex-slaves to freedom just after the Civil War. Poitier also assumed the directorial reins on Buck after he and his director had "artistic differences" on its progress. Its progress at the box office has been eminently satisfactory, according to Columbia executives. Still to come before the year is out is A Warm December. Poitier, who makes no secret of his attachment to actress Joanna Shimkus, possibly chose the London locations for togetherness.

This was also the year that brought to the United States one of the hardiest perennials--and also one of the shrinkingest violets--of them all, Jean-Louis Trintignant. A veteran of more than 50 pictures since starting in films in 1955--including such international successes as And God Created Woman. A Man and a Woman, The Conformist, Z and My Night at Maud's--Trintignant has gained a reputation as a kind of "little man who wasn't there." So completely does he submerge himself in whatever role he's playing that only terribly alert moviegoers are apt to make the connection between, say, the romantic race-car driver of A Man and a Woman and the withdrawn, introverted intellectual of My Night at Maud's. Shortly before arriving here to co-star with Ann-Margret and Angie Dickinson in The Outside Man, the self-effacing Trintignant completed The Assassination in France. Both should be appearing soon--and, as usual, Trintignant will probably build a new following who realize that the face is familiar, though they can't recall quite from where.

But the screen does have an indisputable need for readily identifiable faces. Since most plots, even in this age of the supposedly sophisticated cinema, tend to fall into rather obvious patterns, the faces that fit the formulas remain in enviable demand. A producer with a big Western on his hands doesn't say, "Get me a John Wayne type." He says, "Get me John Wayne"--even though Duke is now well into his 60s. Missing out on Wayne, he may settle for Gregory Peck or Henry Fonda. Should he need a younger version, the first candidate today is Steve McQueen, with James Garner an acceptable alternate. And for Biblical or historical spectaculars, Charlton Heston and Kirk Douglas are still eminently available. All of these actors have sought--and often successfully--to switch types from time to time; but the quintessential reason for their impressive longevity is the fact that, when the need arises, they can always slip back comfortably into Hollywood's most popular standardized genres.

There are a good many actors--top stars who seemed virtually unquenchable a year or so ago--who are slipping away simply because they never found a safe, comfortable niche. The hirsute Elliott Gould, for example, scored heavily when campus radicals seemed to dominate the screen. The vogue for such films proved short-lived, however, and matters weren't improved for him when reports began to circulate about his temper tantrums while making A Glimpse of Tiger, resulting in the shutting down of that production. Last year, Gould mumbled through a role as the loutish American archaeologist who temporarily steals Bibi Andersson from her somewhat stodgy husband, Max von Sydow, in Ingmar Bergman's The Touch. Still to come is The Long Goodbye, co-starring Clifford living's great and good friend. Nina van Pallandt, and reuniting Gould with Robert Altman, the director of È*A*S*H. It may be his last chance.

Again, because their careers were routed along a narrow and very special track, Peter Fonda and Donald Sutherland--both hot properties only two years ago--also seem to be slipping, although each has a new picture (for Fonda, Two People, with Lindsay Wagner; for Sutherland, The Master, with Jennifer O'Neill) due before the year is out. Sutherland has already appeared in 1972 in a picture called F. T. A.--known alternately as Free the Army and Fuck the Army--a documentary based on the traveling antiwar show that he and Jane Fonda carried to base camps here and in the Pacific back in 1971. Revealing him as wild-eyed, bearded, shaggy-haired, messianic and opinionated, the film did little to advance Sutherland's cause, even less to advance his career. In fact, within a few weeks of its midsummer release, American International prudently withdrew it from circulation, declaring vaguely that it had "other plans for it" later in the year. Dennis Hopper, who is Peter Fonda's and Sutherland's close friend and fellow freewheeler, has dropped out of sight since his disastrous The Last Movie--a title that, for him, might prove all too apt.

There is a particularly fine line between those actors who are holding their own and those who have begun to slip--a line that can often be moved one way or the other by a single performance in a single film. Last year, for example, Jack Nicholson was unequivocally hailed as the top-ranking male star after appearing in Carnal Knowledge. But Drive, He Said, which he directed, performed disappointingly at the box office; and A Safe Place, in which he co-starred with Tuesday Weld and Orson Welles, did even worse. This year, Nicholson's hopes are pinned on The King of Marvin Gardens, another wild, excitingly original film from Bob Rafelson, the director of Five Easy Pieces. But meanwhile, is Nicholson holding or sliding? Only your box office knows.

What the box office is saying right now about people like Richard Burton, James Coburn and Paul Newman must be more than discouraging for these still-illustrious names. These three stars earned their astronomical salaries because their very presence on the marquee was supposed to be lure enough for the millions. Not anymore. Richard Burton--even the Burtons--wasn't enough to save Hammersmith Is Out. Advance reports from abroad on The Assassination of Leon Trotsky have been equally unprepossessing. Bluebeard, teaming Burton with such international beauties as Raquel Welch, Nathalie Delon and Virna Lisi, was essentially a cheap exploitation picture--and looked it. Early in August, shortly before he sustained a serious injury while shooting a picture in Yugoslavia, Burton announced that he was retiring from the screen to devote himself to teaching and the theater. Perhaps he had already glimpsed some handwriting on a wall.

Burton's story is hardly unique; it's just that he has had a longer string of unpopular pictures than most. Unless The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean bails him out, Paul Newman--astoundingly--is in deep trouble. Neither Sometimes a Great Notion nor Pocket Money set any wickets awhirling. Lee Marvin is in the same position after co-starring with Newman in Pocket Money and with Gene Hackman in Prime Cut; Hackman can afford a failure at this point, but Marvin can't. Michael Caine, after Kidnapped and X, Y & Zee, is at best marking time, although he has an exceptionally strong role in the upcoming Sleuth, based on the hit play. Sean Connery, fresh from his triumphant return to Bondage in Diamonds Are Forever, has once more announced that he has no intention ever of playing 007 again. (Roger Moore has already been selected as his replacement.) But when Connery gave up on Ian Fleming's suave spy once before, his vast following promptly gave up on him. It became a matter of Bond or bust--and this may well happen again.

And yet. And yet. Happily, every year turns up a fresh supply of--well, not exactly new faces, but young people who, having served their apprenticeships, seem ready to rocket. Some will sizzle, some will fizzle, but at least they have made it to the launching pad. Hottest at the moment is the versatile Stacy Keach, visible this year in two prominent and contrasting roles--as the worn-out, over-the-hill pugilist in John Huston's Fat City and as the dedicated rookie cop in The New Centurions, more than holding his own opposite George C. Scott. A fairly recent recruit from the New York stage, Keach made his first screen appearance in 1968 as a drunken wayfarer in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. But audience acceptance came a bit more slowly. Although Keach is six feet tall, lean and muscular (as Fat City amply reveals), he also has a harelip, an affliction shared by no top stars. It may have helped his characterization in Fat City, in which he played a battle-scarred boxer; but, more important, it proved no hindrance whatsoever in The New Centurions, based on Sergeant Joseph Wambaugh's best-selling slice-of-life novel as witnessed by the Los Angeles Police Department. In it, he uncorked the kind of dynamism that spells true stardom.

This year has also been good to Beau and Jeff Bridges, the handsome, talented sons of the veteran Lloyd Bridges. Beau was particularly effective as the greedy, amoral hospital attendant who played a modern Faust to Richard Burton's Mephistopheles in Hammersmith Is Out--not to mention his several steamy scenes with the zaftig Mrs. Burton as his impassioned Marguerite. Still to come from the blond, husky Beau (who first impressed as the youthful, incredibly naïve cub reporter in Gaily, Gaily) are Child's Play and Your Three Minutes Are Up. Jeff, Beau's younger brother, after a couple of fairly obscure false starts, suddenly hit it big last year as the pugnacious young Texan who impulsively joins the Marines in Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show. This year, he more than reaffirmed that good impression as the heavyweight hopeful befriended by Stacy Keach in Fat City. Jeff seemed to sum up the attitude of both members of the second generation of Bridges toward the industry when he stated, "Nobody's going to make it in front of a camera just because of who he's related to." For his role as the Fat City fighter, Jeff spent six weeks before shooting began boxing with veteran trainer Al Silvani. Timothy Bottoms, his somewhat ingenuous buddy in The Last Picture Show, scored again in Johnny Got His Gun--even though he played much of the film swathed in bandages on a hospital cot. But Bogdanovich has publicly berated Bottoms several times for his lack of discipline as an actor, so the cue to Timothy's future career may well lie in The Romantics, in which he plays opposite the cool, precise Maggie Smith. A casting opposite the delectably kookie Goldie Hawn in Butterflies Are Free, now on the cinema circuit around the country, bodes well for another newcomer, Edward Albert.

Perhaps the most promising of the offbeat young actors edging toward stardom is the versatile Ron Leibman, who came to the screen only two years ago as George Segal's staid, beleaguered older brother in Where's Poppa? Before that, driving a taxi in Manhattan to support himself, Leibman worked in summer stock and college repertory until his performance in the off-Broadway trio of one-act plays, Transfers, won him both attention and acclaim. He moved on to Broadway with We Bombed in New Haven (a rather prophetically titled play written by Catch-22's Joseph Heller) and a manic revival of Room Service. When Hollywood claimed him. it was for the role of Paul Lazzaro, Billy Pilgrim's cosmic, implacable enemy in Slaughterhouse-Five. Playing off of Billy's passivity, Leibman's fanatic, concentrated hating marked him as a comer. He registered strongly again soon after as one of the inept jewel thieves in Hot Rock, despite competition from such seasoned--and formidable--co-stars as Red ford, Segal and Zero Mostel.

Inevitably, the studios' discovery of a vast black audience has prompted a search for new black stars, actors younger than Poitier and more versatile than Richard Roundtree or the rugged Jim Brown. Most promising at the moment are Christopher St. John, Ron O'Neal and Yaphet Kotto, each of them bringing to the screen not only an impressive theatrical background but his own special black charisma. St. John scored last year as the militant leader in Shaft who joined forces with Roundtree to foil a kidnaping; this year, he took top billing in Top of the Heap. Even hotter is Ron O'Neal, the winner of all sorts of theater awards for his work in the 1971 Pulitzer Prize play No Place to Be Somebody. After only two previous supporting roles (with Elliott Gould in Move and with Sidney Poitier in The Organization), O'Neal's name went above the title in Warner Bros.' Super Fly, a movie that buzzed close to the top of the weekly box-office charts. Kotto, who took over the James Earl Jones role in The Great White Hope on Broadway, moved up this year as Jo Van Fleet's burly but tenderhearted rapist in Bone.

Among the year's imports, perhaps the most exciting debut was made by England's debonair Jon Finch, first in the title role of Roman Polanski's (and Playboy's) bold adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth, then as the harassed, down-on-his-luck ex-R. A. F. officer Blaney in Alfred Hitdicock's enormously successful Frenzy. Another Britisher, Michael York, had been called promising at the time of his screen debut as Tybalt in Franco Zeffirelli's production of Romeo and Juliet. As Liza Minnelli's homosexual boyfriend in Cabaret, he remains--promising. Of the Continentals, only Alain Delon, a star in his own right in France and Italy, seemed to be moving up on the American scene, thanks primarily to his co-starring role (with Charles Bronson and Toshiro Mi-fune) in the paella Western Red Sun.

This was a year for the men to reap and the women to weep--at least those women who took their careers at all seriously. Of all the beautiful new faces presented to the American public in 1972, just one--that of blonde, cool-eyed, smoldering Dominique Sanda--seemed to radiate that ineffable aura that marks the superstar. Only 21, Mlle. Sanda has already appeared, to ever-increasing advantage, in no fewer than seven movies. A model at 15, she was discovered on the pages of Vogue by the austere French director Robert Bresson, who promptly cast her in his adaptation of Dostoievsky's Une Femme Douce--an experience that she later admitted she didn't altogether cherish. "In the Bresson film," she told an interviewer in Paris, "I had to be an object--just a bare outline, without color and shadow." The colors began to appear in her next picture, when she played a porcelainlike Russian noblewoman opposite Maximilian Schell in his own adaptation of Turgenev's First Love. Last year, both colors and shadows were impressively evident in her portrait of the slightly tainted wife of an exiled anti-Fascist in The Conformist, and even more noticeable in her portrayal of the patrician young Jewess in Vittorio de Sica's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. This year, she has already been seen in a superior suspense film, Without Apparent Motive; and with any kind of luck, John Frankenheimer's Impossible Object, starring Mlle. Sanda, should also be on view here before the year is over.

A serious actress, Sanda has been repeatedly likened to Garbo. "I think that's because of the shape of my face and the fact that my eyebrows are rather low," is Dominique's explanation; but, physical resemblances apart, she also projects a hauntingly Garboesque vision of a vulnerable yet strong-willed woman who knows what she wants and is willing to pay the price for it. Nor is this too far from her own way of life. Born in Paris, she left home at 15, married briefly and entered films at 17. After her first successes, she remained off the screen for almost two years, taking up residence with French director Christian Marquand. Last May she presented him with a boy, Yanne, out of wedlock (a circumstance, incidentally, that cost her an enviable role in Bernardo Bertolucci's forthcoming Last Tango in Paris, with Marlon Brando; she was pregnant when the shooting began). Frankenheimer calls Mlle. Sanda "the most exciting young actress I've seen in years," and American publications have begun to devote considerable space to "la magnifique Dominique" (as per Playboy's feature in March 1972).

The nearest thing Hollywood has to a new star of equivalent magnitude is the mercurial, golden-haired Karen Black, whose steady rise over the past few years was crowned with what must have seemed, at least at the time of casting, the plum role of the Monkey in Ernest Lehman's production of Portnoy's Complaint. As the sexy and knowledgeable fashion model, most of whose brains are between her hips, the curvaceous Miss Black wrung considerable pathos from the part. But the Monkey wasn't actually that different from her Rayette in Five Easy Pieces, her adulterous wife in Drive, He Said or her acid-dropping prostitute in Easy Rider. One can't help remarking that in the old days, if a studio had a property as original and exciting as Karen, it would have developed her very carefully and cast her in a diversity of roles. Miss Black really is capable of this diversity. With her classic profile (startlingly reminiscent of Dolores Costello, a great star of silent days), she could easily play in romantic costume pieces. There is also more than a suggestion of the kind of soignée kookiness that was Carole Lombard's main stock in trade.

One of Karen's closest competitors is tall, leggy Sally Kellennan, who zoomed to fame with her ten-minute bit in M*A*S*H, reprised this year as Robert Shaw's mistress in Labyrinth, a mystery film, and as the first of Alan Arkin's disappointing inamoratas in The Last of the Red Hot Lovers, in which she showed that the comedic flair revealed in the Hot Lips Houlihan character was no mere fluke. And her deep, throaty voice was surely not irrelevant to her selection for a lead role in Ross Hunter's forthcoming musical adaptation of Lost Horizon. But while Hot Lips remains torrid, her career seems to have fallen into a rut. Furthermore, she has the distinct disadvantage of not having gotten it under way in the first place until she was past 30.

No such disadvantage is suffered by the fresh-faced and willowy Jennifer O'Neill, a top fashion model since the age of 15. After a few roles that required little more than her presence, she suddenly acquired stature as the young widow who sought a single night's solace from a teenager in Summer of '42--but just as promptly, she reverted to supporting-player status in Otto Preminger's feeble and tasteless Such Good Friends. Glass Houses, shot two years ago and released in 1972, revealed Miss O'Neill as a more-than-capable actress--with a more-than-agreeable body to go with it; but her roles in The Carey Treatment and The Master merely indicated that she was still around.

The youthful, British Susan George scored heavily as Dustin Hoffman's selfconsciously sexy wife in Straw Dogs and is currently high on the studios' "most wanted" lists. Similarly, Cybill Shepherd's slim, blonde good looks in The Last Picture Show were enough to win her a prized role in The Heartbreak Kid (not to mention the flattering attentions of Peter Bogdanovich, her Picture Show director). Cybill is hot at the moment--but is there enough heat to keep her going up? Barbara Hershey remains very much in demand, and Playboy's Boxcar Bertha layout of August 1972 reveals a couple of good reasons why. The bouncy Barbara has, however, never become a star in the old-fashioned sense of the word.

There are, in fact, astonishingly few female stars of the first magnitude in any sense of the word. Ann-Margret keeps hanging in there by sheer dint, her career expertly manipulated for her by her husband-manager, Roger Smith. This year, between her electrifying night-club appearances and her TV specials, she managed to film The Train Robbers with John Wayne, and The Outside Man, with Jean-Louis Trintignant (making his American debut). These, plus another, Lenny, should be released in 1973--by which time, we hope, Ann-Margret will be fully recovered from the injuries she sustained in a backstage fall at Lake Tahoe this September. Jane Fonda, who virtually dominated the lists last year with her Academy Award-winning performance in Klute, is still a major contender; Steelyard Blues, with Donald Sutherland, is now onscreen, with Tout Va Bien and Whose Heaven--Whose Earth awaiting release at the moment of writing. On the other hand, the film version of her F. T. A. show was virtually stillborn; and a broadcast over Radio Hanoi, bitterly attacked by Administration supporters as traitorous, was hardly calculated to win her friends or influence people in some circles Stateside. Liza Minnelli, striving hard to walk in her mother's hallowed footsteps, came remarkably close in Cabaret.

The need for something resembling a big name persists; every studio seeks an established female who is sufficiently well known to carry her own weight on the marquees when paired with a male star of equal wattage. Many of them, like Jill St. John, Elke Sommer, Stella Stevens, Ursula Andress and Claudia Cardinale, have long since established themselves as very sexy girls, with very sexy bodies that they are not at all averse to revealing for the camera. Their very appearance in a picture seems to promise an R rating; and producers who have that kind of show in mind unhesitatingly seek them out. If perchance they need someone who can act as well, chances are they will call upon the talented and sexy Angie Dickinson. Since Angie is also Mrs. Burt Bacharach, however, she can afford to pick and choose among the scripts offered to her--such as the upcoming The Outside Man, in which she completes the triangle initiated by Jean-Louis Trintignant and Ann-Margret. Sheer persistence would seem to account for the staying power of such foreign beauties as Brigitte Bardot, Gina Lollobrigida, Sophia Loren and perhaps Virna Lisi (who most recently lost her head to Richard Burton's Bluebeard). But a sex symbol who seeks to project the same sexual image for a decade and more sooner or later tends to become a travesty of herself, like a miniature Mae West.

Because the ideal sexual image is in a constant state of flux--and, let's face it, because a lot of these sexual images aren't getting any younger--a number of the hotter stars and starlets of only a year or two ago are already starting to fade. Faye Dunaway, who began to put more into her offscreen romances than her onscreen characterizations, is a case in point. After a notable screen debut in Bonnie and Clyde, she was hotter than the proverbial pistol. But then came the entangling alliances--with Marcello Mastroianni during the filming of the flaccid Where Lovers Meet, with Jerry Schatzberg while making the disastrous Puzzle of a Downfall Child, possibly with her old mentor, Elia Kazan, while filming his adaptation of his own novel, The Arrangement. Doc, in which her chic good looks were almost maliciously effaced by great gobs of dirty gray make-up, was hardly a leg upward. Still to come is a prize role opposite George C. Scott in Stanley Kramer's Oklahoma Crude, and another in an adaptation of D. H. Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent. At this point, however, Dunaway's fate is very much in the balance.

Even more so is Julie Christie's, as she continues her long-term, international romance with Warren Beatty. Julie has not only been absent from the screen in 1972--she hasn't even announced the starting date for a picture. Concern about not taking an unsuitable role is one thing, but for any actress intent on consolidating her grasp on stardom, this is ridiculous. Candice Bergen, too, has withdrawn from the public eye since her appearances in T. R. Baskin and Carnal Knowledge. A woman of many parts (not all of them in films), she writes, photographs and makes a hobby of sports. Vanessa Redgrave and Glenda Jackson, both of whom were coming on strong only a year or so ago, seem to have settled for character roles.

As we observed earlier about the men in movies, it's often difficult to diagnose whether a star is fading or holding his--or her--own. Raquel Welch hopes that a single film, Kansas City Bomber, will make all the difference. Twelve months ago, Raquel's prospects were less than promising. After years of edging toward the big time, she had pinned all of her expectations on the success of Myra Breckinridge, a triumph that for any number of reasons (the least of which was Raquel herself) never happened. After that debacle, her then husband and manager, Patrick Curtis, took her to Europe and, on the strength of her name, promoted funds for a brace of films that ultimately proved an acute embarrassment to everyone concerned. Hannie Caulder had her loping across the lone prairie in a loose-fitting poncho riddled with almost as many holes as the plot; The Beloved was pronounced unreleasable. Her role in Fuzz, that of a female cop, was little more than a walk-on. But as the gum-chewing, hard-driving, roller-skating pro in Kansas City Bomber, Raquel displayed once again (generally via form-hugging costumes) one of the most spectacular shapes in show business, and also a clean, robust vitality that was immensely appealing.

Barbra Streisand, ever canny in her choice of material, started the year with What's Up, Doc?, which harked back agreeably to the zany comedies of the Thirties, paired her (for a time, romantically as well) with Ryan O'Neal and newly revealed her talent for farce--and enough of the old Barbra to remind us that she may still be the leading song stylist of our time. Another comedy, Up the Sandbox, with fantasy overtones, may be along before the year is out.

Lovely Catherine Deneuve, off the screen for several months while carrying Marcello Mastroianni's child, was represented this year by a tearjerker called It Only Happens to Others and by a Cinderella-like fairy tale, Peau d'Ane (Donkey Skin), which, for all its charm, is still awaiting distribution in this country. Perhaps the forthcoming Lizzie-Ann, with Michael Caine, will prove the restorative that she clearly needs. After her triumph in Love Story, dark-eyed Ali MacGraw, like Deneuve, was forced off the screen by imminent maternity. Ali married Paramount executive Robert Evans, bore him a child and returned to work in The Getaway (unreleased at the time of writing), during the shooting of which she provided reams of copy for the gossip columns because of her obvious attachment to co-star Steve McQueen. In July, the Evanses announced that they were calling it quits. Sexy Dyan Cannon, Cary Grant's ex, is apparently of the persuasion that an actress should act in anything that comes along, just to remain in the public eye; and this year she has been seen in such dillies as The Burglars and Such Good Friends, with Shamus still to come. Since this is obviously Burt Reynolds' year, Dean might just possibly ride in on his trench-coat tails. Elizabeth Taylor (and husband Richard Burton, too, for that matter) would seem to agree with Dyan, for how else can one explain her appearances in X, Y & Zee and Hammersmith Is Out? Surely, she can't plead poverty.

Jacqueline Bisset, Goldie Hawn, Tuesday Weld and Susannah York, along with such lesser luminaries as Britt Ekland and Paula Prentiss, are the typecast girls, the ones who are invariably summoned when the part calls for a young, with-it chick with few hang-ups. The fact that most of them are also very accomplished actresses is obviously a secondary consideration--and no doubt a source of considerable frustration for all of them. Veteran Shirley MacLaine has chosen the opposite approach. After years of playing the brash girl about town who has been everywhere and knows everything, after having been one of the "in" people of Frank Sinatra's old "rat pack," she took the reins of her career firmly in hand and, this year, registered effectively as a dramatic star in Desperate Characters and The Possession of Joel Delaney. Although both roles represented a complete about-face for her, they won her the critical kudos that she so badly needed, and wanted. Now in her late 30s, Miss MacLaine is more than holding her own--and, speculation has it, may be carving herself a niche in politics.

But the earth turns, and with each turning it uncovers new young hopefuls, new potential stars. In 1972, perhaps the most promising is wide-eyed Diane Keaton, who had a brief, sunny role as Al Pacino's second wife in The Godfather, then scored strongly as Woody Allen's all-too-understanding ladyfriend in Play It Again, Sam. (She had layed the same role for better than two years on Broadway, but still managed to look as if she were hearing Allen's wacky dialog for the first time.) Also up and coming is Valerie Perrine (pronounced Purr-Rhine), especially since her appearance as Montana Wildhack in Slaughterhouse-Five. After an interlude in Europe, financed by work as a Las Vegas nude showgirl, Valerie ventured out to Hollywood and, in a sequence of events that supposedly happens only in fiction, she met an agent who hustled her over to Universal to test for Slaughterhouse-Five. Out of some 200 contenders, she won the role--and a Playboy feature. The offers have been coming in ever since.

But the woods are full of girls who catch the right eye at the right time. Diana Rigg, from Britain via Broadway, made an impressive American film debut as the girl who allayed for all time George C. Scott's fears of impotence in The Hospital. Susan Tyrrell, from off-Broadway, was no less impressive as the sodden, misogynistic dame with whom Stacy Keach shacks up in Fat City. From the London stage came Francesca Annis, Polanski's youthful Lady Macbeth in the Playboy production of Shakespeare's tragedy. Shapely, sensuous Paula Pritchett, twice a subject of Playboy pictorials, was a top model with the Eileen Ford Agency until director Jan Kadar, seeing one of her commercials, cast her in his film Adrift--which was immediately followed by a larger, more demanding role in Ralph Nelson's Wrath of God. opposite Robert Mitchum. Other models following the same route include Maude Adams, Candy Clark, Samantha Jones and Gwen Welles (featured in our pages last month). Among the many Playmates who have moved from centerfold to center screen are Sue Bernard, the Collinson twins, Claudia Jennings, Liv Lindeland, Cynthia Myers, Dolly Read, Anne Randall and Victoria Vetri (known as Angela Dorian when she braved the great stapler in September 1967). The gorgeous Victoria Principal, described by some as a second Ava Gardner, has had a career that sounds as if it had been discovered in a fortune cookie. Although she had taken acting lessons in all parts of the world, she had never appeared professionally on any stage when she was summoned to read for The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, opposite Paul Newman. She got the part (as his Mexican mistress) and immediately thereafter was cast for an even more important role in Playboy's forthcoming production of The Naked Ape.

Because of the vast upswing in black-oriented pictures this year, there has been a corresponding increase in plum roles for black actresses--and a heartening supply of beautiful and talented ladies to fill them. Perhaps in the lead at the moment is Rosalind Cash, who made a strong impression last year with her supporting roles in Klute and The Omega Man, this year as Stacy keach's sympathetic nurse in The New Centurions, and attained full stardom in MGM's Melinda. Tiny, electric Jonelle Allen moved from a principal role in the Broadway hit Two Gentlemen of Verona to the romantic lead in Come Back Charleston Blue. Kathy Imrie, a fashion model and veteran of TV commercials, moved this year into the big time as Richard Roundtree's girlfriend in Shaft's Big Score. Judy Pace, Marsha McBroom and Brenda Sykes, all of whom have been around Hollywood for the past several seasons, have suddenly found themselves in constant demand. But the greatest find of 1972 is the tiny, dynamic Cicely Tyson, with a head like a Malvina Hoffman sculpture. Miss Tyson stood out as the smoldering, resentful black girl in her only previous film performance, in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, some time back. This year, as the brave young mother in Martin Ritt's moving portrait of a black family, Sounder, she has won unanimous raves, and many are convinced that she's headed for an Academy nomination.

The year's most unconventional entry into motion pictures, hands down, was made by blonde, statuesque Nina van Pallandt, currently at work with Elliott Gould, as mentioned, on Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye. Plunged into the headlines because of her not-so-clandestine Mexican holiday with literary horn-swoggler Clifford Irving, the baroness (by a former marriage) seized opportunity by its golden forelock and was soon being seen--and heard--on talk shows everywhere. Nina had been a moderately successful folk singer in European night clubs; her sudden notoriety promptly won her an engagement in the swank Maisonette room of New York's St. Regis, a book contract reputed to be in six figures and Altman's movie offer. Not a bad parlay from a single weekend. How long the fair Nina, now pushing 40, can make it stretch is another matter.

There's something different about the films of 1972. The movies are beginning to approach sex more gingerly, to cut circumspectly away from those moments of nudity that less than a year ago would have been boldly flaunted. As a result, these upcoming starlets, who hope one day to be transformed into fullfledged sex stars, are probably going to have to do it the hard way--not by exposing vast quantities of pearly flesh but by implying vast quantities of uncontainable sexuality. For those who have mastered the trick, from Theda Bara to Raquel Welch, the film medium has always reserved its highest honors.