Next Stop, Greenwich Village

New York, 1953. Larry Lapinsky leaves the house in Brooklyn and moves to Greenwich Village; he wants to be an actor. He takes a small flat, goes to acting class, and joins a circle of friends in the cafés. But his mother has not accepted it; she turns up at the door unannounced, brings food, sits down and does not leave. Larry is trying at once to build the new life and to break off the old one. Paul Mazursky writes and directs. Lenny Baker plays Larry and Shelley Winters plays his mother. Christopher Walken and Jeff Goldblum, then unknown, are in the cast, and so is Ellen Greene. The film rests on Mazursky's own youth; he was an acting student who moved from Brooklyn to the Village in those same years. The subject is not becoming an artist but a young man not quite managing to separate from his family. The mother is comic and the film does not mock her; Shelley Winters plays the part as funny, unbearable and painful at once. The Village of 1953 is built in detail: the coffee houses, the acting classes, the political arguments, and the matter of abortion, then illegal. The narrative moves loosely; it is the portrait of a milieu and a year rather than a plot. Who it is for: viewers who like the personal American films of the seventies and New York narratives. Who it is not for: the structure is scattered, some supporting figures are left half finished, and the rhythm takes time to settle into.