12 MARCH 1983, Page 30

Cinema

Ham-handed

Peter Ackroyd

The Missionary ('IS', selected cinemas) 'Et must have seemed a good idea at the I time — the notion of an innocent young clergyman starting a mission for fallen women in the East End is replete with comic possibilities which only the English know how to develop: vicars and tarts, gaiters and garters, sniggers and giggles. And since the film is set in 1906, it gives everyone the chance to ham it up in the usual fashion. Even the sets can look agreeably nostalgic.

In fact The Missionary begins in exactly this fashion: Mr Fortescue, who has been a missionary in Africa for ten years, returns to England clutching a large, black fertility symbol. It is grabbed at once by Lady Ames (Maggie Smith at her thinnest) who has ob- viously seen nothing of that size or colour for many years. Fortescue, however, returns to his young fiancee who adds a new horror to innocence, principally by missing the point of everything.

It is all in the tradition of conventional English comedy, entirely based upon sexual innuendo and relying upon the principle that there is no joke better than the one you have heard or seen before, and that a suc- cession of jokes or visual gags is quite an ac- ceptable substitute for a plot.

At this stage it is no more than a slightly cumbersome vehicle for Mr Michael PalM, who both wrote and 'stars in' the film. He is a likeable performer, although he labours under the disadvantage of being no more than likeable. He rolls his eyes upwards and offers timid little smiles — every inch the in- sipid clergyman — but he has a certain thin- ness and frailty which go far beyond the demands of his part.

That makes it all the harder for him, then, to remain in control of a film which lurches from a farcial accent of golden- hearted whores into a meandering and al- most incomprehensible saga of Fortescue's relationship with Lady Ames. And then he leaves his fiancee waiting at the altar . . . .

But we are all waiting, principally for jokes and, as the audience start shifting in their seats, The Missionary starts visibly to collapse in front of our eyes. First the jokes disappear, then the old stagers (Trevor Howard, Sir Michael Hordern, Denholm Elliott et al) begin fraying at the edges, then the plot collapses.

The trouble with the picture, quite simp- ly, is that it does not know in which direc- tion it is supposed to go. Mr Palin himself comes from the Monty Python stable, and the best moments in this film have that same quality of perfectly observed mayhem. But clearly Mr Patin wanted to move away from that kind of humour — perhaps he wanted to be taken more seriously, as a comic actor rather than a comedian, or perhaps he just grew tired of the old tricks. But as soon as The Mis- sionary ceases to be a compilation of funny or sick jokes it becomes nothing at all part farce, part satire, and part melodrama with appalling moments of 'seriousness': 'That's the trouble with you, Charles. You're far too decent. Don't let them make you into a hero.' But it is not good having such moments of 'character interest' if there are no real characters to support them. A film is either meant to be funny, or it is not: this constant dilly-dallying with the question is absurd.

There are some good moments, however, scattered throughout as if no one quite knew what to do with them. Sir Michael Hordern is very good as an absentminded butler, stern and unflinching in his in- competence. Trevor Howard plays a homo- sexual peer who writes letters to the Times about punishment. And Maggie Smith is a most elegant nymphomaniac. But the film is so clumsily put together that it is much less than the sum of its parts — it possesses that slightly tatty, cardboard quality which one associates with the worst moments of Hammer Horror. And since The Missionary was also made by an English production company, Handmade Films, one suspects that this may be the fate of most of our at- tempts to make popular glossy films.