"Little Murders" is another of the obscure films I saw at base/post theaters during my military days. It was certainly better than average and many of the images (especially the wedding scene with Donald Sutherland) have stayed with me through the years.

While I found it less funny during a recent viewing than I remembered, the message was still disturbing and contemporary. It is certainly satire and black comedy, but you often lose yourself in the story. It is a very individual film, different people will laugh at different times and at different things. During a theater viewing it seemed to isolate audience members from each other.

Jules Feiffer's screenplay is about Alfred (Elliot Gould),a NYC photographer and self- described "apathist", sort of an unengaged existentialist. He is completely disillusioned and has deadened himself to the cries, smells, sights and pains of violent city living; in a Big Apple even more adversarial than that of "The Out-Of-Towners".

Alfred can't feel much anymore but he takes an interest in Patsy (Marcia Rodd),a controlling interior decorator optimist, who wants to change him. Patsy has been able to stay upbeat and involved despite daily encounters with muggers, snipers, obscene callers, and a family that leaves a lot to be desired.

The film seems to be saying that harsh urban life cuts its people off from gentler human emotion. As an interior decorator Patsy's life is largely defined by her ability to control her possessions and the attitudes of those around her.

Patsy's father, mother and younger brother are living a painful parody of "family life," and Alfred's weirdness eventually allows him to fit right in. The dinner scene where he first meets her family is one of the funniest in film history.

The film illustrates that neither apathy nor constructive engagement are successful mechanisms for coping with the modern world. It seems to be saying that the only rational response to living in an insane environment is to vigorously participate in the insanity.

Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.

Comedy about how New Yorkers are coping with pervasive urban violence, obscene phone calls, rusty water pipes, electrical blackouts, paranoia and ethnic-racial conflict during a typical summer of the 1970s.

So, this is the sort of film that has a good deal of long, boring parts, but is more than made up for by some of the incredible smart dialogue. Early on, we get a wise discourse about what to say if people are going to beat you up, and what they might assume you to be in return. This speech, by Elliott Gould, is brilliant.

But even more brilliant, and the real highlight of the entire film, is a rambling sermon and wedding ceremony from Donald Sutherland, an "existential" minister. His rambling about "love" and "the deity" is not what you expect fro ma minister and this has to be one of Sutherland's greatest roles.

When they were all in their heyday, Elliott Gould, Alan Arkin (who also directed) and Donald Sutherland collaborated on the over-the-top black comedy "Little Murders", in which Gould plays emotionally vacant New York photographer Alfred Chamberlain, hooking up with vivacious young Patsy Newquist (Marcia Rodd) in the midst of several hundred unsolved homicides in the Big Apple. In the process of everything, the series of events exposes the flaws in all the characters, especially Patsy's parents (Vincent Gardenia and Elizabeth Wilson).

I think that my two favorite scenes are the appearances of Sutherland and Arkin. Sutherland plays a priest who seems to be a cross between Sutherland's characters from "MASH" and "Kelly's Heroes"; Arkin plays a detective who spouts out the craziest monologue explaining why there's a conspiracy behind the murders. Overall, this is very much a New York kind of movie. I should identify that there are several very long scenes during the movie, but it's certainly not a flick that you'll forget anytime soon. Impressive.