Film:'Don't Look Now,' a Horror Tale:Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in Leads The Cast Suspense Yarn Turns Into a Travelogue

Nicolas Roeg's "Don't Look Now," which opened yesterday at the Sutton Theater, is a fragile soap bubble of a horror film. It has a shiny surface that reflects all sorts of colors and moods, but after watching it for a while, you realize you're looking not into it, but through it and out the other side. The bubble doesn't burst, it slowly collapses, and you may feel, as I did, that you've been had.Not only do you probably have better things to do, but so, I'm sure, do most of the people connected with the film. These include Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, who play a haunted young English couple, and maybe even Mr. Roeg, the director, who has staged a number of individual sequences with a lot of dash and style, but not enough to disguise the emptiness of the screenplay.This is credited to Alan Scott and Chris Bryant, who have taken a minor short story by Daphne Du Maurier and attempted, unsuccessfully, to elevate it into something on the order of "The Turn of the Screw."It doesn't work. The film takes its supernatural phenomena seriously, but the suspense depends on a twist that comes not at the end but about halfway through. At which point, "Don't Look Now" stops being suspenseful and becomes an elegant travelogue that treats us to second-sightseeing in Venice.For John Baxter, an art historian, (Mr. Sutherland) and his wife, Laura (Miss Christie) Venice is a city filling up with disasters as it sinks back into the sea. Unknown to John, though not to us, he is gifted with second sight. The film opens with an agonizing sequence in England when their five-year-old daughter drowns in a nearby pond, a fact that John senses without questioning why.In Venice, where John is working on the restoration of an ancient church, the Baxters encounter a pair of mysterious English biddies, one of whom has the "power." They cheer up Laura enormously by telling her they've been in touch with her dead daughter. They also warn John that danger awaits him if he stays in town.Actually this plays somewhat better than it tells. Mr. Roeg is able to maintain a sense of menace long after the screenplay has any right to expect it, largely because of the sincerity of his actors and because of the presence of the sinking city itself.Mr. Roeg, who was a cameraman before becoming a director with "Performance" (co-directed with Donald Cammell) and "Walkabout," gets a great performance from Venice, which is all wintery grays, blues and blacks, the color of the pigeons that are always underfoot.The one bit of color that registers on John is that of a brilliant red parka worn by a child who, from the back, looks just like his dead daughter. The figure appears to him at night, at the end of dark alleys or fleeing from something on the other side of the canal. John also has some other hallucinations that I dare not describe without giving away the plot.I can describe a beautifully photographed love scene between John and Laura, which is intercut — for essentially comic results—with post coital scenes of the couple getting dressed for dinner afterward. The point, I guess, is that if you can see into the future, it's often difficult to keep your mind on the present, no matter what you're doing.One of the problems with "Don't Look Now" is that second sight does not easily translate as a terrifying talent for a film character to possess. It simply looks like a flash-forward, which, along with the flashback, the jumpcut and the fade, are standard story-telling devices in movies.

The CastDON'T LOOK NOW, directed by Nicolas Roeg; screenplay by Alan Scott and Chris Bryant, based on a story by Daphne Du Maurier; produced by Peter Katz; executive Producer, Anthony B. Unger; director of photography, Anthony Richmond; editor, Graeme Clifford; music, Pino Donnagio; an Anglo-Italian Co-production by Casey Productions (London) and Eldorado Films (Rome), distributed by Paramount Pictures. Running time: 110 minutes. At the Sutton Theater, 57th Street, east of Third Avenue. This film has been classified R.Laura Baxter . . . . . Julie ChristieJohn Baxter . . . . . Donald SutherlandHeather . . . . . Hilary MasonWendy . . . . . Clelia MataniaBishop Barbarrigo . . . . . Massimo SeratoInspector Longhi . . . . . Renato Scarpa