[In the following review, Kauffmann commends Forman's artistic vision in Taking Off, but argues that the film lacks consistency and direction.]

Milos Forman had an interesting idea in Taking Off. He wanted to do a film about the generation gap that made its point primarily through pictures. The content of most films, particularly the ones with social themes, is usually conveyed in words and story. Taking Off has words and a story, of course, but they are only the scaffolding for the purely cinematic elements, which really state the theme.

Forman is a young Czech director (Loves of a Blonde, The Firemen's Ball), now working in the US. For a time, I enjoyed what he was doing here in this first American film of his, and I also had some of the same feeling one gets from Victor Sjöstrom's or F. W. Murnau's American films in the '20s: the odd sensation of seeing the very familiar as it looks to someone who is filtering his vision through different conditioning. The cinematographer was Miroslav Ondricek, who did The Firemen's Ball (he also did If … for Lindsay Anderson); between him and Forman, we get a sort of Middle European view of New York and suburbs. That is to say, we get a sense that this society is being observed as stratified and traditional, rather than flexible. An East Side luncheonette woman is a peasant, aloof and suspicious; the details of suburbia are displayed as caste marks, even when satirized; a bilked cab driver chases a nonpaying customer like a market-day stall-keeper.

Forman's chief cinematic device is the close-up, often done with a telephoto lens so that the naturalism is softened and surprised. He likes to shuffle faces in front of us like a prestidigitator with cards, and he does it often with faces that we see only once, using them to create his topography. He likes to intercut between sequences of close-ups, as when the parents of a teenage girl are worrying where she is, and their worries are intercut with close-ups of an audition for singers in the East Village, which the girl is attending. (Forman particularly likes close-ups of people concentrating on some effort: this audition sequence is like the beauty contest sequence in The Firemen's Ball.)

But Taking Off flounders. Loves of a Blonde had some good vaudeville skits in it, like the one with the boy in bed with his parents, but it was tenuous. The Firemen's Ball was so self-admiring of its quaintsy ways and character sketches that it soon bogged down in Gemütlichkeit. Forman's first American picture has just as much self-adulation and a less secure grip of its materials.

The details are accurate enough in themselves, but they don't all fit together. (Two of his script collaborators were American but haven't helped on this point.) The parents of the teenage girl who takes off are a mixture of cornball suburbia and swinging suburbia. The father who gets drunk in a cheap bar is hard to connect with the swank man who goes to a hypnotist to cure himself of smoking. The daughter is sketched so loosely that we're apparently asked to supply her reasons for running off from our portable files on Youth Problems.

At the end she brings her new boyfriend home to dinner, a fantastically successful hip musician. The father asks the youth to sing after dinner; youth demurs. Last shot is the father singing—“Stranger in Paradise”—with mother at piano, to the young couple who sit on the floor watching impassively. This is funny in the abstract, incredible in the reasonably sharp father we have been shown.

There is absolutely nothing more to be “said” in films on the generation gap at the moment, and it's nice that Forman recognized this by not trying to “say” anything. But to make a picture that gets its life simply by living—like Passer's Intimate Lighting (also shot by Ondricek)—takes a subcutaneous sure touch that Forman didn't have even at home. He laid on atmosphere very heavily and had a deficient sense of attention-span—another way of saying deficient theatrical talent. In Taking Off he is also socially insecure. Forman has some cinema gifts but insufficient control of them.

The only performance worth noting is by Lynn Carlin, who was the wife in Faces and who plays the girls mother here with delicate, sexy ease.