Filmgoing Can Be a Walk on the Riled Side

Jay Dugan says he did it once, when the gremlins went into the blender. By then he’d seen enough. After maybe an hour of mayhem and gore, he decided he could stand it no longer.

He got up and left the theater, quitting “Gremlins” before the movie ended.

“It was so disgusting,” said Dugan, 34. “It was so gross. You feel a sense of relief when you walk out.”

Some do, some don’t. Some see flashing on the screen the limits of their tolerance for inanity, profanity, sex, violence or their own boredom. Some are moved in these extremes to seek solace in a four-letter word glowing in the darkness: “EXIT.” Others endure for sundry reasons, blind optimism among them: No, no, it can’t be this bad. . . . All right, it can be this bad, but it can’t possibly stay this bad. Can it?

At this festive time of year, when, as Dickens might say, movie abundance rejoices, when film critics wade valiantly through surging tides of cinematic slush, take note of a rough division of the species. There are those who just might walk out, those who never would, those who feel bound by professional duty or financial obligation to stay until the closing credits roll. It’s a question of temperament as well as taste.

“I like action, I like a certain amount of shoot-’em-ups,” said Dugan, as he waits to see “Elizabeth.” But, he says, “when there’s too much gore, I don’t like it.”

Chris Millard, a contracts lawyer, recalls a moment when he and a couple of friends together discovered the limits of their tolerance for idiocy. They were watching “RoboCop.”

“After a while we all decided it was stupid,” Millard said. “It was stupid from moment one and steadily went downhill.”

Three Strikes and He’s Out

The three friends looked at one another. Even in the darkness of the theater, things were clear enough. They got up and left.

Millard, waiting with his wife, Gayle, to see “Elizabeth,” said he’s not a habitual walker-out. It’s got to be an extreme case, a three-strikes situation: “If it evokes no emotion, if I don’t feel like laughing or crying and if it’s bad acting, it’s ‘Let me cut my losses and move on.’ ”

Gayle Millard has never reached this crossroads.

“I’ve never walked out of any movie,” she says. “I fall asleep. But I fall asleep in the good ones, too.”

A sleeping movie companion might well alleviate the potential hazards of walking out as a couple. One simply leans over and whispers: “Sweetie, wake up. We’re leaving.”

With a companion who is awake, however, the question of walking out requires a more delicate approach. There you are, suffering in silence, feeling you’ve seen enough. Do you say something to your companion? What if she’s enjoying the show? Would that spoil it? What then? Better to keep an eye on her for a sign of hope: some squirming in the seat, some twist of the mouth signaling disgust.

Chuck and Lillian Bowers faced this situation years ago when they saw “Caravaggio.” Chuck, who recently joined the Men’s Film Circle, a group devoted to watching action movies featuring guys named Bruce, Arnold, Jean-Claude, etc., was not connecting with “Caravaggio,” a 1986 film about the late Renaissance Italian painter.

“It was probably the worst movie I ever saw,” said Bowers, a physicist.

Lillian Bowers said she and her husband quietly discussed a question of multilayered nuance: to walk or not to walk?

“He said, ‘Let’s go,’ and I said, ‘No,’ ” she recalled.

That settled it. She watched and enjoyed the movie while he hissed editorial comments about what he considered its artsy pretensions. The marriage survived.

Critics See a Lot of Schlock

One person’s choice is another’s luxury. Consider those members of the media corps who suffer mightily this time of year. In this busy season, film critics may see four or five movies a week, most of them schlock. An utterly unscientific survey of 10 movie critics across the country shows that most feel professionally obliged not to walk out of a movie, however dreadful it may be.

This includes Margaret A. McGurk, film critic for the Cincinnati Enquirer, who said, “My motto is: ‘I see ‘em so you don’t have to.’ I stay to the bitter end of everything.”

Nonetheless, critics who embrace this school of thought often find their sense of professional duty tested. McGurk recalls being pushed to the brink of flight in 1995 by “Showgirls,” with its “horrible lap-dancing scene” and “horrible sex scenes.” This fall, she was nearly chased from the theater by the Jerry Springer movie “Ringmaster,” a film that inspired critics everywhere to hold their noses.

“I couldn’t wait for it to be over,” McGurk said. “It was just a waste of time.”

Joe Baltake of the Sacramento Bee said a really bad movie may become an object of “perverse curiosity. How bad can it get?”

If it gets really bad, chances are it will make for an entertaining review. Critics said they sometimes like to stick around until the end just to amass ammunition.

On a more optimistic note, Joe Holleman of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch said: You never know. It might get better.

“It’s like covering a city council meeting,” Holleman said. “You have to be there just in case something happens.”

Maybe a promising actor debuts in the last 15 minutes. Maybe a bit of snappy dialogue crackles across the screen. Maybe, as James Cagney demonstrated in “Angels With Dirty Faces,” a deadly movie can find redemption in its last minutes.

The opposing view is best summed up in the “rancid soup” analogy supplied by John Simon, the famously acerbic drama and film critic of New York magazine. Novelist Jacqueline Susann once rebuked Simon publicly for lambasting one of her books when he had read only the first 40 pages. Simon recalled that he answered her complaint with a rhetorical question:

“If you get a bowl of rancid soup, do you have to spoon out every drop to know it’s rancid? . . . The same principle applies,” Simon said.

Simon does not feel duty bound to sit through an awful show or movie, but he said he does feel obliged to say in his review that he walked out before the end. He wrote a scathing piece in the National Review in June 1997 after walking out halfway through “The Designated Mourner,” a movie with Wallace Shawn and Mike Nichols.

“The film was Wallace Shawn at his worst,” Simon said. “Not that his best and his worst are that different.”