CINEMA
Forceful Fists
Odr-NNE of those cool, blonde, tight-lipped, V./sweater-and-pearls girls so much admired in Italy is practising driving; and, as she re- verses, having a row over something with a young man. Impossible to tell what's up before we switch to a dinner-table: the horribly familiar Italian familial gloom, silences, outbursts, spooned soup, dark furniture, a cat that jumps on the table and eats from a blind woman's plate, an atmosphere poisonous, sickly, hysteri- cal. Who are they? What's happening? It takes ten minutes or more to begin to make head or tail of I Pugni in tasca (literally but rather meaninglessly translated as Fists in the Pocket). And by the time the characters have settled down into a woman with four adult children (one more or less normal, three epileptic—two of these incestuous and the third moronic as well), and the eldest's fiancee, the driving girl who is more dislikeable, though less lethal, than the rest, we are clutched by the throat, right inside it, eating their meals, feeling the dank air of their hopelessness, the desperate boredom of days spent mostly lying on the bed, doing nothing.
There can have been few first films as brilliant as this one of Marco Bellocchio's, its style dense and close-knit, its weight of spiritual innuendo worn lightly, its horrific story manag- ing to seem strangely relevant to everyday domesticity, as if something of all normal family life (adult family life, at least) were distilled in it. The child in Poll de carotte wrote: 'a family is people who live in the same house and hate each other'; but these family relationships aren't so simple—love, dependence, the clutching rather than the rejecting passions, are part of their very foetidness. A chubby-faced boy called Lou Castel plays the second brother with beautiful, sinister restraint. He pushes his mother over a cliff and drowns his younger brother in the bath; in spite of boasting of it, gets away with both murders and tries to kill off his invalid sister as well. He looks like the young Brando, there is nothing externally evil about him, yet one knows, as it were, the flavour of this particular evil and wretchedness. For Bellocchio has bored deeply into abnormal but not unimaginable minds, acts, attitudes. His film, which at time seems almost nonchalant, would be superb in an old hand: in a new one, it is hard to credit.
Joseph Losey's Modesty Blaise is just what the Bond films should have been and weren't: witty, and visually a delight. In fact it makes the whole Bond genre look so lumpy and laboured that I shouldn't wonder if it wiped out competitors from now on. It is so accurately- fashionable in every detail that it will clearly be a source-book for social historians who want to know exactly how things looked up to the week the cameras stopped rolling; but it still manages to avoid the modish subservience of style that infected (say) Reisz's recent Morgan or, though more skilfully, Lester's The Knack—the subservience to fashion that loses a director his personality and presence. Losey stands outside fashion, which is something of a feat when you consider the almost excruciatingly fashionable- ness of everything he handles in Modesty Blaise —strip-cartoon characters, Monica Vitti, queen till now of the aseptic Atonioni world and, like Garbo in Ninotchka, actually smiling for what I think is the first time, Terence Stamp, king of Cockney glamour, op art interiors, Dirk Bogarde in a silver wig, jokes visual, comparative, con- versational and practically three-dimensional. Funny and exquisitely accomplished, it is screen nonsense as it ought to be.
The history of It Happened Here is already well known in film circles—how its directors, Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo took eight years and only £7,000 to make it, how they limped along filming when there was money,, stopping when there wasn't, how no one would touch it at first and how at last, after a vital cut, it has its public showing. I have seen it twice (with and without the cut), and have already disagreed —hurtfully and to the point of open quarrel— with a friend convinced of its evil effect, if not evil intent.
In the story (by Brownlow) the Nazis have invaded and conquered England. A nurse, think- ing that order had better be imposed on chaos, even if Hitler's new order doesn't exactly appeal to her, joins a fascist organisation and is gradu- ally involved in the full horrors of Nazi methods —in the end injecting Polish prisoners, including a small boy, to a 'merciful' death. Anti-fascist opposition, where she finally lands up, has taken over fascist methods. The film's realism is astonishing, disconcerting, horrific—grainy like a newsreel, it is a nightmare not just of what might have happened but of what, with other buildings for background, did happen. To see it all so familiarly sited (German troops all over London, partisans in Wiltshire and Dorset), and with a terrifying exactness of tone as well as of physical detail, is to feel the crawl of fear on one's scalp. That Brownlow was a small boy when it really happened makes it all the more uncanny.
ISABEL QUIGLY
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