[In the following positive review, Wilson discusses Forman's understated directing technique in Taking Off.]

‘I think I speak English well enough to understand the “first row.” But what's behind that, the double meanings, and all the nuances, which are very beautiful, always this is difficult for me.’ Milos Forman needn't have worried about those nuances. Taking Off, which he made in America last summer, is replete with them.

We say we'd like to see ourselves as others see us, but we don't always like what we see. The Czech firemen weren't too pleased about The Firemen's Ball, and Americans—to judge at least from American critical reaction—are somewhat disgruntled by Taking Off. Forman himself tells a story which illuminates the wrongheadedness of this reaction (life, as always, imitating art): when he showed The Firemen's Ball in small towns across the States, audiences couldn't wait to regale him with anecdotes about their own local fire brigades, and many of them, he says, were funnier than anything in the film. Forman's films are not of course about national idiosyncrasies, and Taking Off is no more about middle-class urban Americans than A Blonde in Love was about working-class provincial Czechs. The film is set in New York, but really the only specifically American thing about it is that its theme appears to be a more commonplace social phenomenon in New York than it is in London or Prague. Taking Off is quintessentially a Forman film.

Characteristically, the theme is the generation gap, only this time seen through the eyes of the parents; the father frozen in bewilderment at the end of Peter and Pavla is at last given his voice. When, that is, he has something to say, which isn't often. Most of the time Larry Tyne (Buck Henry) is content to meditate owl-like behind his outsize spectacles; when trouble threatens, he wanders off into a hypnotic reverie, a cigarette-substitute urged on him by a cheerfully morbid psychiatrist in a multicoloured bow tie. Larry is the sort of man who has always steered clear of trouble. He is reasonably well off, comfortably ensconced in a New York suburban apartment, a reasonably average guy. At the moment his only concern is coming to terms with the onset of middle age; and when one evening his wife Lynn (Lynn Carlin) is on the verge of hysterics after their teenage daughter has gone missing, he is nonchalantly unperturbed, though just a little confused by a situation he's not prepared for. In a marvellous bit of Forman timing he executes a kind of double shuffle and stumbles out into the night clutching a giant framed photograph of his errant daughter.

The point is, and Buck Henry's enduring look of bemused exasperation explains it all, that even if Larry doesn't understand Jeannie's reasons for running away, he at least appreciates the gesture. Driving back from a fruitless journey upstate where a counterfeit Jeannie has been arrested for stealing a Japanese portable TV set (‘Sony?’ asks Lynn, petit bourgeois to the last), Larry finally airs his feelings: ‘She's out having fun. That's what we ought to do—go some place and have fun, goddammit.’ Earlier, out looking for Jeannie in what he imagines to be likely East Village teenage haunts, Larry ends up at a bar, tipsily cracking eggs on the counter and demonstrating for his equally tipsy neighbour his self-hypnosis trick. Forman intermittently cuts back from this scene to the waiting women, with Lynn by this time blithely engrossed in her neighbour's account of her mild-mannered husband's voracious sexual appetite (‘In the kitchen too … he's inimitable’), climaxed by an impromptu rendering of the song and dance routine which apparently turns him on in the middle of the night.

All through the film Forman cross-cuts between the generations, counterpointing stumbling parental pomposity with the inarticulate self-assurance of their children. Jeannie is just one of hundreds of girls who turn up for a pop audition, an event which gives Forman the opportunity for another of his visual catalogues of the human face as the camera (Miroslav Ondricek again) probes a score of expressions and every one of them speaks volumes. The variation is in the camera eye of the beholder as much as in the object of his gaze (at one point a Polaroid montage of faces takes us right through a song). And if, like the cross-cutting, the device is overindulged in terms of the film's structure, it's an indulgence one can allow such a master of timing. Don't count the faces, count the number of times in the film Forman makes telling use of a pause or a double-take where a lesser director would have settled for a reaction shot.

Not that one can really speak of a Forman style. His art is rather that of a master craftsman, an astute and sympathetic chronicler of that mine-strewn area in human relationships between what is said, what is meant and what is understood. After the cold, and to some disenchanted, conclusion of The Firemen's Ball, Forman is here once again the amused and tolerant observer of human frailty. His characters may be vulnerable under the camera's close scrutiny, but his view of human nature is essentially that of an optimist; and even if it's simplistic, this tolerance is like a cool draught of air after the clammy narcissism of so much native American self-analysis. Forman's art, though, is deceptively simple. There's a stunning, almost dreamlike sequence in the film—when Buck Henry exchanges the stuffy night debris of his apartment for the mysterious promise of an urban dawn and Dvorak's ‘Stabat Mater’ magically soars on the soundtrack—where the resonance is infinite.

As always with Forman, there's a double edge to humour, a discomforting sense of laughter reflected in a mirror image of oneself. All the same, Taking Off is easily his most enjoyable film, in its best moments irresistibly funny. Larry's encounter with the woman who introduces him to the Society for the Parents of Fugitive Children (whose evening dress convention and nervous after-dinner experimentation with the pleasures and perils of drugs provide two hilarious Forman set-pieces) is in its accumulation of detail a masterpiece of comic timing, and quite possibly Forman's homage to the great American tradition of screwball comedy. It's echoed throughout the film—in the strip poker variation (‘Texas one-card showdown’) to which the Tynes' SPFC friends introduce them, in the scene in the nightclub when a tight Mrs. Tyne is propositioned by a pair of jaded hustlers who know a respectable suburbanite when they see one—but it would spoil the fun to catalogue the varieties of middle-aged folly.

Even if Taking Off reveals in Forman a tendency to let his actors over-respond to the material, to milk it of slightly more than its promise (the last sequence in particular, a confrontation between the Tynes and their daughter's money-spinning rock musician, is a little strained in its ironic effects), there is more than enough fresh invention to demonstrate that Forman's visit to America has been richly rewarded. As he says himself, ‘In any other country you are a foreigner. Here, after one week, you are an American.’