THE IRREVERENT ESSAYIST STRIKES A SATIRIC NOTE

In the middle 1960s, the Captain Bligh of local film critics operated not on television but in the pages of Los Angeles magazine. Burt Prelutsky, who is short, had come out of UCLA, where he worked on Satyr, a humor magazine with a dizzingly inventive caricaturist named Hank Hinton, who is tall.

It was clear from his reviews that Prelutsky loved the movies; it was also clear that he was terribly easy to dissatisfy. What marked Prelutsky’s work was that his spleen and his sense of humor were intimately related. His dismissals were absolute but funny, although whether the prevailing laughter eased the pain among his victims is not certain.

I have no printed source at hand, but the approximate text of a line from his commentary on the film of John O’Hara’s “A Rage to Live” has stayed in mind these 22 years. “It is now clear,” Prelutsky observed, “that Suzanne Pleshette stayed married to Troy Donahue just long enough to steal all his acting secrets.”

Prelutsky was not overwhelmed by the studied and interminable ennui of some early films of Michelangelo Antonioni, and he speculated in an essay whether it was possible to make a movie about bored people that was not in itself boring. He thought not, and the evidence available to me is that he was right.

Then, after 10 years of cheerful literary mayhem in the fertile field of film reviewing, Prelutsky kicked it cold. I was astonished. I had by then started reviewing films myself, and while our tone, if not our sensibilities, were divergent, I loved the work, and his work, and couldn’t imagine anyone abandoning it for other pursuits.

It took me 13 years to understand why he had said, “Enough.” After a while the rewards of the art form seemed to be spaced further and further apart. There just weren’t enough of those original and invigorating films that justify the medium, and all the other hours you’ve spent in the dark.

Even worse, the working critic begins to be able to detect in the first reel, often in the first 30 seconds, whether what we have here is a turkey or a masterpiece or a glittering mediocrity somewhere in between.

It’s like reading a mystery and realizing on Page 3 that you’ve read it before and that it was old Mrs. Van Gelder, kindly to a fault, who had slipped the mickey in the colonel’s gin. The difference was that you could drop the mystery but were stuck in the dark with the movie, praying for pleasing surprises not later than the last reel but seldom encountering them.

Raves and rants are cinches to write; it’s the competent, dull middle ground that’s hard to be readable about. Prelutsky, a quick study, figured that out in a decade and tiptoed out through the foyer and into the lighted street. It took me a bit longer.

Since those days, Prelutsky has been writing for television--stories most often marked by mature compassion rather than university wit. His name is on some of the most moving episodes of “MASH” if you note the credits as they fly by on the reruns. He wrote for “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and went on to do several movies for television, including a fine item called “Aunt Mary” and another called “A Winner Never Quits.”

He has continued to be a part-time essayist for several periodicals, including The Times for several years (the essay not being an efficient way to sustain wife, child and shelter). The best of the essays have been gathered in volume called “Civilization and Welcome to It” (Capra Press, Santa Barbara, $7.95), illustrated with a manic graphic flair by his tall pal from UCLA, Hinton.

Most of the book is funny, naturally, a stiletto assault on everything Prelutsky finds abrasive, absurd, mendacious, preposterous, tedious, transitory and trivial in this society. He is on to the imps, as he calls them, who run our lives and who see to it, for example, that you are never rear-ended by anybody with insurance.

As in the works of every revered humorist I can think of, including Robert Benchley (especially including Robert Benchley), there are passages in Prelutsky when the mind conjured the ghostly image of drops of blood on the forehead and an imminent deadline hanging like a sword. Certain comforting formulations recur. But it is to be noted that the targets remain in the sights.

Yet what is also true of funny writers, including Jim Murray, is that when their strong emotions are aroused--anger, love, patriotism, loss--what you get is something very special. The best thing in Prelutsky’s collection, I think, is his elegy on his father. It is wry, angry, deeply loving and very touching.

Prelutsky writes for television and is admittedly not an objective witness, yet his defense of the medium against the quantity of ridicule that is dumped on it is quite convincing, not least that television becomes a handy scapegoat for all of society’s woes. The funny pieces themselves have a way of kidding on the square. In an essay about drugs in the society around him, Prelutsky makes a common-sense case against them that is more persuasive than preachment.

“The way I look at it,” Prelutsky says, “if you’re already Jewish, certifiably neurotic, and write for television, you don’t have to go looking for trouble.”

Irreverence is Prelutsky’s stock in trade and it’s a welcome astringent, but it does not quite conceal a reverent notion that things might get better if you point out what’s wrong.