Even though "Straight Time," which opens today at the Coronet Theater, has been tailored to Max's dimensions it's not a small-time movie. Ulu Grosbard,the director,and Alvin Sargent. Edward Bunker and Jeffrey Boam, who wrote the screenplay, have succeeded in making an uncommonly interesting film about a fellow whose significance is entirely negative. It's almost as if the real subject of the movie were all the things Max isn't.

 

This may be to invest "Straight Time" with more purpose than was ever intended, but it is such a leanly constructed, vividly staged film that one seeks to justify the way it compels the attention. The first words we hear in the movie are those of the guards as Max is getting out of prison—"Open the gates"—while the rest of the film is the detailed case history of a man doing his unconscious best to get back in.

 

The movie makes no attempt to explain Max. It simply says that this is the way he is. It requires us to fill in the gaps, and it's the measure of the film that we want to. In the meantime, we watch as Max has his early run-ins with his Los Angeles parole officer, a sadistic, patronizing redneck, marvelously well-played by M. Emmet Walsh, and accept as inevitable his return to life as a holdup man.

 

The film's most surprising and involving sequences are the series of heists that Max carries out, at first solo, then in the company of an old associate, a fellow named Jerry Schue (Harry Dean Stanton), an ex-con, now a paint contractor apparently happily married, who is going out of his mind with the boredom of a settled life that involves a backyard swimming pool and barbecue pit.

 

"Straight Time" makes a concession to convention in the casting of Theresa Russell as the young woman who has a brief affair with Max. Miss Russell, who was so good in "The Last Tycoon," is an extremely appealing actress, with a kind of contemporary authority, but she looks so classy, so understated-chic, that she suggests an upper-class girl whose path would cross Max's only at the beach, or maybe at a singles bar. The two really belong in different movies.

 

The film is beautifully acted by everyone, but especially by Mr. Hoffman, Mr. Walsh, Mr. Stanton and Gary Busey, who plays a junkie friend of Max who cops out at the last minute of a crucial job. "Straight Time" is not a movie to raise the spirits. It is so cool it would leave a chill were it not done with such precision and control that we remain fascinated by a rat, in spite of ourselves.