CINEMA
Baker Street irregularities
CHRISTOPHER HUDSON
Three of the four films this week (I'm including a very funny short at the Curzon) are parodies, and in two of them the joke lasts about an hour too long. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes ('AA', Odeon Leicester Square) isn't even a full-blooded parody, but falls uneasily between mockery and respect for the original. The Great Detective himself as played by Robert Stephens comes across as a character just this side of fairyland. Effete, misogynistic, he prances through the film in cape and deerstalker, pettishly complaining that he wouldn't wear them if he hadn't already been typecast by Dr Watson in the stories circulating in the Strand magazine. Boredom is another kind of drag, and he helps himself through it with cocaine;. but when the delec- table Gabrielle Valadon lies naked before him, he takes no more advantage of her than to decipher the luggage ticket inked on her palm. Then, elegant nostrils wrinkling, he packs her off to bed.
If it was all like this there might have been some high camp entertainment, a Some Like it Stone-Cold version of Billy Wilder's masterpiece. But Wilder, who directed, is on record as saying he's loved the stories from boyhood and the last thing he would want to do is parody them in any way; and certainly there is a serious ending. Perhaps American directors are temperamentally as inept with British legendary characters as they are, Benny Green was claiming in these columns last week, with their sets of Victorian Lon- don.
But there are some good things, as there have to be in a film scripted by L A. L. Dia- mond and Wilder himself. Colin Blakely is excellent as dear, lovable Dr Watson, the doggedly faithful friend; and Clive Revill gives a good cameo performance as RogOzhin the conspiratorial Russian ballet director. And of course as Gabrielle Valladon there is Genevieve Page, an orna- ment to any film, who flutters her eyelids like boudoir curtains and manages to retain all her elegance, not to say chic, after being fished out of the Thames; no mean achieve- ment. Finally there is the matter of the Policeman and the water-sprayer: but that would be giving away too many secrets.
After_sitting through thirty-five minutes of tedious shorts, trailers and intervals for tutti-
frutti, one can finally get to see Dirty Dingus Magee ('AA') at the Ritz, Leicester Square. It isn't worth it. Burt Kennedy produces and directs a parody of the saloon-bar Western, and this time it's really meant to be a parody—the kind of thing you do when you don't want to make a serious film and can't think of anything new that's funny. Frank Sinatra, in his favourite role as the little man's little man, plays Dingus the ten-cent gunslinger who robs an old friend (George Kennedy) and gets chased by him for most of the rest of the film: on horseback, under beds, over balconies, across rivers and during what his Indian girl refers to simperingly as 'bim-bam in the bushes'.
If the jokes came once they would only be secondhand, but they are rammed home like cotton wadding. The focus of the action is the bordello, run by the local mayor (Anne Jackson) but for all the action that goes on there it might be a nursing-home for Vic- torian seamstresses. Every now and again the Army appears on the horizon chasing In- dians, led by a general who is convinced that a full-scale battle is impending and says, in the film's one memorable line, 'If I can get there before General Custer I might be a very famous man.'
The only good thing to report is Jack Elam as the beetle-browed villain John Wesley Hardin, a faded squint-eyed dude who comes stalking down the main street and takes on the entire town in a gunfight from which he emerges unscathed and morally superior —the one bit of true pastiche in the film. In the end, Dingus comes off best (is this written into all Sinatra's film contracts?) but we lost interest long ago. As a parody the film isn't a whisker on Cat Ballow.
The best new double-bill in London is to be found at the Curzon, where Pierre Etaix's new comedy Le Grand Amour ('u') is paired with one of the most hilarious of recent shorts, The Dove, written by Sidney Davis and directed by George Coe and Antony Lover. In this latter, all the stock metaphysics and morbidities of the Svensk filmindustri are turned lightly upside down. An old professor of seventy-six, with a hernia, takes the opportunity of a visit to his outdoor privy to put aside all his illusions and aspirations and take a cold, hard look at his past life. Flashback to the summer in- terlude of youth. Incest and lesbianism are brushed in deftly, together with every sym- bol in the Scandinavian commonplace book from cracked mirrors and rosebuds to Death challenged to a game of badminton. The Dove is the unifying symbol, crapping on the participants at moments of high drama. 'Somehow,' says the old gentleman, but- toning up and leaving, 'I feel better now'. Endsk.
Film directing must be one of the most aggressive occupations there is, but Pierre Etaix, together with Milos Forman and perhaps Truffaut, has always struck me as having to be an extremely pleasant and civilised man.. Nothing much happens in Le Grand Amour but it is never less than fascinating.
The husband, played by Etaix, has several girlfriends but decides to settle down. He marries one of them. Taken in to his father- in-law's company and nagged unceasingly by his wife's mother, he remains outwardly saintlike. Inwardly he seethes with mock- heroic desires which reach bursting-point when he employs a new and beautiful secretary. After several tragi-comic episodes, all ends happily.
Nothing is overstated. Everything is pointed with a sharp irony and the oc- casional hilarious gag (as when, in a send-up of Weekend, the roads are occupied by men in nightshirts driving motorised beds, some rolling along happily, others colliding and bursting into flames). Le Grand Amour is not as brilliant a film as the same director's YoYo, but it's worth seeing all the same.
Previous page
