Cinema
Take the Cow by the Horns
By ISABEL QUIGLY Li'l Abner. (Plaza.) Kidnapped. (Studio One.)—Sergennt Rut- ledge. (Warner.)—Les Grandes Families. (Paris-Pullman.) ABNER, as every American knows, and some of us here have heard too, has been going for over a quarter of a century in a comic strip about Dogpatch, a town in the darkest depths of the South, which, even to foreigners like me, is one of the most joke- prone places on earth. Ever since General Jubila- tion T. Cornpone, the town's hero, lost the Con- federates the Civil War practically single-handed, Dogpatch has gone its own way, untroubled by the outside world; and here the film (director : Melvin Frank; IP certificate), transferred from the stage musical that never reached us (maybe they thought it too remote), takes over, and the outside world turns up at last to use Dogpatch as an atom bomb testing ground, since, of all places in the US, it has been judged, in spite of its anthropological interest, the most unneces- sary. The Dogpatchers are at first delighted to be the most anything at all. 'Your government is spending a million dollars just to blow your houses off the face of the earth!' the authorities announce, to frantic cheers. Then it dawns: the beauties of Dogpatch life will be lost if some- thing isn't quickly done to save them, and that something is Mammy Yokum's Yokumberry Juice that has raised her boy Li'l Abner so strong and handsome.
It is all, to my mind, a huge success and the funniest of the big American musicals by a very long way. The Americans walloping their sacredest cows is something (in films at least) rare enough to seem precious and Li'l A bner wallops with the energy and amiability you might expect, but with rather more subtlety. There's militarism, big business, tycoons. television jingles, the cult of the gorgeous beast (who hap- pens to be impotent), Lolitaism ('I'm past my prime,' is the seventeen-year-old's song), Ameri- can sexual customs, and all the slimy, hectic, fertile swamps of the Southern legend. The pace, except here and there, is fast but follow- able; and there is that strange ability to catch you (foreign and reluctant) up in a purely national legend that all the good American musicals have had. Like the names: who could fail to respond to Earthquake McGoon, or Appassionata von Climax, Moonbeam McSwine or General Bullmoose, Mayor Dawgmeat or Rasmussen T. Finsdale? Not me.
Kidnapped (director: believe it or not, Robert Stevenson; `I.J' certificate) strikes me as being about the best Young Person's film—by which I mean from about ten onwards—I remember. Stevenson could hardly have hoped for better treatment. This has pace, excitement, a fair amount of authenticity, charm, wonderful scenery, and Peter Finch. And it has, besides, a nicely suggested air (very good for Young Per- sons) that there's more to it—life, adventure, what you like—than meets the eye; that the boundaries of boyhood and adventurehood aren't the limits of everything, and that adult life has its mysteries and pitfalls, enviable, incommunic- able. Peter Finch somehow conveys this—all irony and humanity, toughness and humour, with some reassuring moments of human weak- ness, a swashbuckler who manages to remain an adult. James McArthur, adult in years by now but Peter Panishly formed to look a permanently puzzled seventeen, is David Balfour, and I par- ticularly liked all it said about the way a should behave to an older man he likes enoini' ously but often disapproves of; and how, in fa`l, a boy should comport himself with dignity a!, without uppishness, while never failing to spa' his mind (hard things to do, all at once. at se% co' teen). Altogether, on moral as well as xsthr, and amusing grounds, it is a first-rate boys' 111'1' and as a practical example of tough. me"'' honourable behaviour—on the sort of mantle!, have, and how to keep your end up, and 1" to give way and when not—it couldn't 1. bettered.
John Ford is the most likeable director I on think of, even when he isn't at his best, and st): though Sergeant Rutledge ('A' certificate) isn I by a long chalk his best, I still recommend it for its charm, for its feeling of 'westernness' 0°, other director can approach, and the mixture el realism and romanticism, humour and lyricism, that is always unmistakably Ford's. Sergeant Rutledge is a Negro, an in every way exemplarY character in a northern regiment after the Civil War, accused of rape and murder and defended at the court martial by his commanding officer, who, against all appearances, on the strength of his ten-year knowledge of the man believes in his innocence. Jeffrey Hunter, growing progressively more like Fonda in appearance and manner, Is tough and suitable for a not very demanding part, and the acting honours (the only ones) go to Woody Strode as Sergeant Rutledge, a man so impressive—physically and, you feel, as a per- son—that he seems (rather than Hunter) a nevi and interesting embodiment of the Ford hero. The film consists largely of flashback from the courtroom (rather clumsily flashed, at times), bill there are some moments of the old Ford grandeur not just out of doors (in fights with Indians, long- distance rides, the honourable relationships he' tween men of action and the tenderness they are capable of), but in the courtroom, paradoxically when the prisoner breaks down under cross- examination. In spite of the magnificent main performance, I wonder what coloured people would think of Ford's touching but sentimental portrayal of the Negro troop, though.
From an overwrought and hysterically silly three-decker family chronicle by Maurice Druon, Denys de la Patelliere has taken the first volume and made an intelligent, sober film about rich people, Les Grandes Families (`A' certificate), and my only complaint is that he has shifted it twenty years in time, so that some of the social comment, which was aimed at 1938, is a bit dated today. Still Jean Gabin, who plays the self- made mild-mannered family tyrant, wouldn't date if he was Rip Van Winkle, the great stony face and block of white hair belonging anywhere he likes to put them, yet somehow without loss of personality, as happens with so many versatile actors; and the film conveys very well the ageless, dateless feeling of great riches, of their cushion- ing power and the astonishment when it vanishes, and does so not through elaborate scenes or much luxury, but just through the manner, the clothes, the detail, of everyone around. Pierre Brasseur has one of his usual flamboyant parts and good unobtrusive actors—Bernard Blier, Jean Desailly, Jean Murat—remind one of the days when `character acting' seemed a monopoly of the French cinema.
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