Cinema: Wild 90

Norman Mailer put his money where his mouth is and turned out a movie he claims “has the most repetitive, pervasive obscenity of any film ever made.” He may well be right, but it is rather hard to tell. Much of Wild 90 is utterly unintelligible, with a partially overloaded sound track and a thoroughly overloaded cast of characters who are barely able to get their thick tongues around the four-letter words.

The caper began last winter, when Mailer’s play The Deer Park was running off-Broadway. Mailer and a few of the actors got into the habit of boozing together in a Greenwich Village restaurant after performances. As boys will, they fell into a game of let’s pretend. They pretended they were Sicilian gangsters, and they gave themselves names—Cameo, Twenty Years, The Prince (Mailer, of course)—and they talked tough and dirty at each other night after night. It was all such fun that Mailer laid out $1,500, moved his make-believe Mafiosos into a large empty office, supplied them with submachine guns and pistols and plenty of liquor, and in four consecutive nights shot 2½ hours of 16-mm. film that was eventually cut to 90 minutes.

In Wild 90 Mailer, with Buzz Farbar and Mickey Knox—both of whom are real actors—pretend they have been holed up together for days. They yell at each other and chain-drink. The camera stays mostly on Mailer, who goes “Unhh! Unhh!” a lot while he is thinking up dirty words. People come and go. One is a prizefighter (José Torres) with a German shepherd. Norman has a protracted barking contest with the dog, and spars a round with Torres, demonstrating the killer-wombat style with which he has enlivened so many Manhattan parties. Toward the end, two broads arrive—one of them Beverly Bentley, the current Mrs. Mailer. She hands him a knife a couple of times, but nothing comes of it. After a while the money runs out, and the home movie just stops.