CINEMA

Tall stories

PENELOPE HOUSTON

The Immortal Story (Academy Two, 'X') Simon of the Desert (Academy Two, 'X') Crooks and Coronets (Warner, `U') Even the Academy looks like having its work cut out to find future programmes on the level of its current trio—not necessarily in terms of quality, but of sheer attractiveness and watch- ability. To Truffaut's Stolen Kisses (at One) and the beguiling Indian The Runaway (Three) has now been added a notably munificent double bill: Luis Bufiuel and Orson Welles, both at the easiest pitch of their form, two perfectly balanced short stories to be tasted (or, rather, gulped down) in a total running time well under two hours.

Welles snatches first place on length—an hour to Bufluel's forty minutes—and perhaps accessibility. The Immortal Story is taken, very faithfully, from one of Isak Dinesen's later tales (it's in the volume Anecdotes of Destiny) in her most lucid, ironic and oracular mood. Her 'immortal story' is the immemorial sea- port yarn about a boy off the boat who is offered five golden guineas to spend the night with a rich old man's beautiful wife. To Mr Clay, a China Coast millionaire with a mind as parched as his account books, a story as such is an unimaginable, impermissible oddity. Nothing exists until its ledger entry can be drawn up; and so, implacably, madly, he sets out to make this particular legend become a manageable fact.

As Isak Dinesen wrote it, the centre is the story, and its almost independent power of

creating its own frame of reference. As Welles films it, or rather as he plays Mr Clay, there's

a certain subtle redefinition of terms. One thing Orson Welles can't possibly hope to do, any more than Sheherazade, is persuade us for a moment that he doesn't know a story when he hears one. He is Mr Clay, the withered merchant; but as he sits wearily back in his great chair, leonine Orson, he also in a kind ofdouble vision brings right on to the screen the sibylline presence of the story-teller. Fas- cinated as ever by power, and illusions of oMnipotence, and th6 permanently lost chances of age, he annexes Mr Clay into the company of all the great Wellesian losers—from Kane to Quinlan to Falstaff.

The interplay between the mistiness of accountable fact, and the shifting realities of the legend for everyone involved in its re- creation, is very delicate; and one of the charms of Welles has always been the feeling for nuance in a director whose whole per- sonality seems built for mass'and force. Roger Coggio, as the sharp little mouse of a secre- tary, and Jeanne Moreau. as the woman in the case, go beautifully along with him. The gap in the film's charmed circle, undeniably, is Norman Eshley's performance as the sailor. But he has to become the living legend, and one suspects the part is simply unplayable.

Welles made The Immortal Story for tele- vision, which no doubt explains a certain

wispiness about the look of the China Coast

Banters Simon of the Desert also. looks, to put it mildly, simple in terms of resources,

but these aren't directors in need of a battery of toys to play with. Their grown-up craft con- sists in doing more with less. Bufluel's Simon has been perched up on his pillar for six years; or so (at the opening, he's actually moving; to a more.commodious pillar presented by an. admirer) and clearly his stubborn and fatuous. sainthood has become a trial for everyone con-.

cerned. Tetchy or playful monks haul up his rations; Simon nibbles on a lettuce leaf; his

mother moves, in considerable discomfort, to a,

dejected shack under his lofty perch. Up pops the Devil (Silvia Pinal), meekly disguised as a hoop-rolling schoolgirl temptress or bearded

lady with lamb, or whizzing' over the desert encased in a self-propelled coffin. But Simon.

(Claudio Brook) is armoured in faith and im- perviousness. At the end, they've got him doivn and he is watching New York swinging itself to destruction, and sighing gently, im- perturbable to the last, for his vacated pillar.

The drums of Vito d'Or rattle out again over Simon's desert. Bufiuel has learnt nothing (when did he need to?) and forgotten nothing. His deceptively wide-eyed fable has the smooth. slippery. black glass surface of a sheet of newly formed ice; and there's no temptation whatever to try to score it with a critical pickaxe. Rather, to enjoy the master at his blandest and slyest.

'Crooks and Coronets is one for the mid-. Atlantic audience, nurturing familiar delusions

about our island folklore. Two incompetent American gangsters plan a stately home rob- bery, but are so overcome by the fey aristo- cratic charm all around that they stay on to foil their ruder accomplices. Direction and 'script are by Jim O'Connolly, and both dis- tinctly on the slow side. One nice moment, though, when Edith Evans happens to be bombing the tenantry from a First World War plane. 'Them Germans seem to be at it again,' says one resigned old person, as the neighbouring garden vanishes in a cloud of smoke.