Kubrick and Malick are philosophical filmmakers who have taken great pains, and used innovative techniques, to put across their message. At the other end of the cinematic spectrum are tens of thousands of mediocre pornographers who crank out 1-hour masturbation inducing exercises with careless abandon.
RUNAROUND, made by Cosmos Films in 1970 to feed its 8th Ave. Manhattan theater, is an odd case where the very crappiness of the product makes for a pathetic but powerful insight. It is not recommended, unless you are a student of structuralism like myself.
The repetition (of scenes and setups) so meticulously practiced by Kubrick in 2001, THE SHINING and A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, is naively presented here by the anonymous director out of budgetary necessity. It adds up by the end of the properly titled RUNAROUND to suggest the tedium of daily existence, and the emptiness of meaningless sexual gropings (especially the simulated soft-X stylings presented here).
Fred is a husband who neglects his wife. The iterative bed scenes at home look they were filmed all at once (saves on setups), as one of the most beautiful women in the Cosmos stock company (almond skinned, almost mulatto lady with dark nipple cones) is cast as wifey Jackie, begging hubby for sex each night to no avail.
His routine of dressing for work, or undressing at bedtime is painstakingly presented real-time over & over, to pad the film's running time, but working (unintended) thematically. Similarly, there is cheapo tracking footage of him driving his Buick to work or home or to a liaison -dull time-killing footage, but also helpful to the whole.
Scenes at work have colleague Richard visiting his under-dressed, bargain basement desk set to talk man-talk about sex and conquests. Again, they all look like they were filmed at once, in fact Richard wears the same exact gaudy outfit to work three days in a row, evidencing the unconvincing technique.
Hero spends his nights humping other women, leaving him too tired to service Jackie. His busty secretary Betsy is one easy conquest, plus a foursome engineered by Richard with two "hippie girl" blondes Dawn and Sharon, for which Richard paid a total of ten bucks for their participation, indicative of the cheapness assumed not only in 1970 reality but in this production as a whole.
With a corny plot twist that would leave O. Henry spinning, film concocts a happy ending, resulting in Fred announcing: "Oh Jackie, I've been such a fool" and they hump until he's tired out once again. The marriage has been saved.
With terrible acting (Fred is a complete, low-energy blank, and Richard can barely recite his lines), film is of course merely an excuse for the split-beaver tight closeups that were the rage in 1970. Fred and Richard's cocks never threaten to become erect, and the sex simulation is lame laying on of hands and never-very-close hints at intended cunnilingus.
Sloppiness rules, as in a memorable moment in the final scene where a loud distracting noise on the set briefly scares Jackie, who looks around at the camera crew, before resuming her seductive mode re: hubby. This clunker is left in the final print.
It adds up to boredom, no surprise, but with an intensity Warhol only dreamt of. The cast's meaningless gestures add up to one null, lifeless existence and far from the intended bliss with Jackie, we are left instead with underpaid & anonymous porn performers who most likely will be soon permanently unemployed as hardcore sex replaces their teasing soft X manipulations. I never saw any of these Cosmos films theatrically, but they add up to a particularly bleak legacy of an entertainment era in flux.
