In A THOUSAND CLOWNS, Murray Burns (Robards), a former TV comedy writer, cannot brook conformity, and it seems the same can be said about Broadway directer Fred Coe, transposing the titular play onto the silver screen, what the film dazzles and hammers home is its rip-roaring black-and-white jump-cuts and cross-cuts of its locality and its denizens, NYC’s huddled mass hustling and bustling in the megapolis’ beauty spots, all relentlessly lensed through, Arthur J. Ornitz’s vary-angled camera alluding to the all the rage French New Wave, more often than not, in conjunction with Don Walker’s blasting marching band score, immediately the effect stands out from the crowds, a reinvigorating stratagem is engrossing at first, only, this is Coe’s only ace in the hole, which he would eventually flog to, if not death, definitely, fatigue.
The rub is, Coe is too self-aware of the film’s genesis, for the majority of its running time, it takes place in Murray’s garçonnière, where he lives with his 12-year-old nephew Nick (Gordon). So lest audience feel entrapped in one place for too long, Coe plants a pair of itchy feet on Murray, who gallivants outside his cramped digs as much as he could, which creates a problem since those sallies dilute the condensed time-line of the story, the narrative is loosened up, do you truly believe Murray’s diurnal gadding about with Sandra Markowitz (Harris) all over the city can be completed within one day? On stage, that hiccup will never happen.
Speaking of the narrative, the crux is that Murray’s devil-may-care Weltanschauung will come to an end if he intends to keep the legal custody of Nick, after the visiting of two investigators for the Child Welfare Board, Sandra and her superior Albert Amundson (Daniels), he must seek a job to contest that he is capable of rearing Nick adequately, but the film supervenes his ultimate action in favor of an evasion that is obstinately rhetorical, with Murray tiresomely changing the topic whenever he is advised to look for a job, for one thing, if you are not in the same wavelength with him, Murray is such a frustratingly uninteresting character, passively narcissistic, “why bother?” often pops out in Yours Truly’s head during the screening.
The saving grace is the cast, Robards have rarely given a bad performance through his entire career, here only in his early 40s, he manifests a strangely resigned facade of faux-naiveté, parrying off all the offensive or sweet-nothings with an air of nonchalance, cannot be arsed to do anything except gloating over one thing that others him from the rest, yet he stake a claim all right. Harris, in her film debut, gives a memorable if haltingly inconsistent impersonation of a “manic pixie dream girl” prototype.
A bizarre case is Balsam, who plays Murray’s brother-cum-agent, and wins an Oscar for being the opposite of his kooky brother, i.g. conformity brings the best version of his Arnold, it is solid work, but far from the best of any given year’s crop; where either Gene Saks (as Murray’s former boss, the TV personage “Chuckles the Chipmunk”) or William Daniels make a good/bad fist here (the former is a crying nuisance while the latter finds dignity in his priggishness), the real person to be reckoned with is a precocious Barry Gordon, as Nick (with goodly other alias, who still has made up his mind to choose a legit name), he ends up with the heavy lifting as our source of compassion and amazement, it is a kosher Oscar-calibered playacting that goes sadly unacknowledged, and lastly, one question remains: if Nick finally grows a backbone, why Murray still decide to go back to work?