11 DECEMBER 1959, Page 22

Cinema

Intellectual Gimmick

By ISABEL QUIGLY Vicious Circle. (Paris-Pullman.) — The Horse Soldiers.

(Odeon, Leicester Square.) HELL, says Sartre, master of the intellectual gimmick, is other people; or, capitalising More grandiosely, les Autres. But then so too, if you take so anthropomorphic a view of the universe, is heaven. If other people can cause us the deepest misery they must (since they matter that much) be able to give us the highest happiness as well. In Vicious Circle Sartre shows us three people tearing one another to spiritual and emotional bits, assures us they will go on in just the same way for all eternity, and says : That is hell. Like three blind mice in their Second Empire drawing- room the lost souls chase round on their wheel of sexual frustration, round, round, round, till one's head spins at the thought of all that triviality multiplied into infinity. It sounds hellish enough. Then suddenly you shake yourself and realise : they're miserable people anyway who led miser- able lives before this, their hell is in themselves, as with Marlowe's Mephistopheles; putting them in a room together doesn't make it any more hellish, it just multiplies their private frightfulness by three.

The play—particularly when it was broadcast— was effectively claustrophobic : the heat, the lights that were never dimmed, the eyelids that never blinked, all came across with horrid effect be- cause there were only three characters and a single room (and a sort of infernal chasseur who ap- peared at the beginning with the unanswerably existentialist question : Pourquoi vous brosseriez- vous les dents?'). Now that it has been filmed, by Jacqueline Audry (`X' certificate), it loses all that essential concentration by succumbing to the temptations of the film medium to get out and about in time and space. A perfectly enormous cast list makes one think that someone has been tampering somewhere, right at the start; and sure enough, instead of coming straight into their lugubriously furnished resting place we have the damned turning up in an hotel lobby, filling in forms, trying to bribe the clerk, even trying to get out; and supernatural 'business' like a coin that sizzles through the carpet or flames that roar past outside the lift. And in the room itself, instead of conjecture, reminiscence, confession and the rest to uncover the pasts of the three souls there, we have a window that turns into a supernatural telly and peers back into the world to see how everyone's carrying on without them. The Les- bian's partner in the suicide pact has gone back to her husband, the hero has been discredited and proved a coward, the woman who dropped her baby in the lake sees the man who adored her told the truth by her best friend. Much of this Sartre presumed in the play, but without any literal win- dows back on to the world. The film medium has so many technical tricks to draw on, though, that some directors get conjuror's mania and can't resist the sizzle in the carpet, however ludicrous, or the elastic nature of space and time, however much they need compression and concentration to get the required effect. The effect, in this case, being one of everlasting isolation. Here in the film version, what with the chasseur popping in for some more characteristic little jokes (when did we stop raving over this sort of French character acting?), and the window flashing all sorts of worldly information from Rio, Paris, and the unnamed town where Ines happened to live, all sense of enclosure, isolation or even eternity is lost. Or even eternity: There's the impossibility in play or film. None of us can perhaps conceive of eternity, in hell or out of it, but to conceive of it in terms of human bickering is expecting too much. Reason of the most earthbound sort creeps in. Is their hell cumulatively hellish? After (say) a thousand years of the same arguments, do they turn round and start quarrelling over some-• thing else? Do things get worse with practice, or better? And why, oh why, with their hell in their hands, don't they just turn round and shut up?

But this sort of reasoning is aimed at Sartre; the film is Sartre diluted beyond all effect, though Arletty gives grim authority to the Lesbian. Even the general point that loveless people generate misery (and this makes for Sartre's hell without any specific quarrelling) is lost because one gets no particular impression of character in any of them. The fluffy infanticide and the bragging coward never come alive; one has a feeling of their incompatibility, but not of the terrible un- alikeness that makes the three, with only vicious- ness in common, torture one another beyond bearing in circumstances that must be borne. When you try to conceive of it, absolute misery is as inconceivable as absolute happiness. 'Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, neither has it entered into the heart of man': as they say of heaven, but it might rather better apply to hell.

John Ford backs the North in The Horse Sol- diers (`U' certificate) but sets his film in the South. His horse soldiers—suitably named, since there is nothing of the cavalier about them—are a Union brigade with an object to achieve, and, as so often happens in adventure films, inimical country to get through before they reach it : sneaking through Mississippi, in fact, to cut the Southern supply lines, and picking up a Southern blonde on the way to stop her talking of the plans she hears them discussing through an acoustically remark- able chimney. The Unionists lack the Confederate glamour and spend their time, even on the hand- out, wearing braces; but with John Wayne as the tough colonel who hates doctors, and William Holden as the army doctor he naturally hates, the preposterous heroine (Constance Towers) has a fair amount of choice.

In watching war films these days I keep noticing a growing degree of pacifist feeling in myself and in the neighbouring seats, or could it be in the directors? Ford makes no explicitly anti-war points, yet his battle scenes—particularly the futile, heroic charges—don't come across as exciting, simply as absurd, wasteful, pathetic, and in all senses, bloody. And he touchingly guys the `charge' sort of heroism by putting an entire mili- tary academy of little boys in a thin white line and getting them to go through the routine of a text- book battle; at which the entire Union brigade, fearful of stray bullets but absolutely unable to fire back, takes to its heels and horses. But in general Ford's realism has deserted him.