CINEMA
Not making it
CHRISTOPHER HUDSON
Villain (' X ' ABC 1) is another moulting wreath on the coffin of the British gangster film. Richard Burton, piggily unpleasant as Vic Dakin an East End gang chief, has two basic varieties of social intercourse. He punches people in the solar plexus, and he kicks them in the crotch. The thin story, shot on trendy Kray Brothers locations in a used-car lot, a gambling club and the back room of a launderette, is about a wages snatch and its aftermath; but Michael Tuchner, the director, is mainly concerned with the realism of his gangsters, and this means as many people getting thumped as time will allow
Dakin starts off by thumping Benny Thompson, a croupier who grassed on the gang. He is hit in the face twice (" Ugh, ugh "), punched in the solar plexus (" Urgggghh "), and is carved up with a knife around the eyes and nose (" Aaaaahhh ") before being hung up by his shirt-tails from the balcony. Then Dakin goes home and gives his old mother a cup of tea (" Oooh "), but this is a rare moment of non-violence. When his young boyfriend Wolfe turns up he finds it impossible to communicate his love except by a tender punch to the jaw (" Oumph "), after which he picks the lad up, dusts him down and says "We'll go into town tomorrow and buy you a new suit."
The wages snatch is a merry free-for-all with coshes, and Dakin next sets to work on the miserable wages clerk who tipped him off originally. He takes him out to the back stairs of the inevitably sleazy strip joint and gives him money for not grassing on the gang. But first he sets upon him in a frenzy of kicking and punching, and the camera only, reluctantly, leaves the little chap as he arches up to begin retching. Very realistic. All that needs to be added is a no-holds-barred copper (Nigel Davenport), a debauched MP (Donald Sinden), a tough deb and a kinky marquis, to establish the film's credentials to tell it how it is. Social historians please note.
Now to the other great British production of the week. Girl Stroke Boy (' X ' Prince Charles) was made, so we are informed, at Faggots End in Hertfordshire — a suitable location for this Ned Sherrin picture with Caryl Brahms collaborating on the screenplay. The film turns, excruciatingly, on a boy coming back to his parents' house in the country with an elegant West Indian friend who could be of either sex — an androgynous creature breastless, with an Afro hairstyle, who drives the parents frantic with worry.
There is no more to the film than that. The jokes are of a relentless and twee insipidity that would have had Oscar Wilde turning in his corset. Joan Greenwood and Michael Hordern, both fine actors, are reduced by the dialogue and totter through in attitudes of comic despair. The two younger people aren't worth mentioning, and the director may also like to go unnoticed. The story might have been camped up into a minor frolic, but this film is feeble, mindless, desiccated rubbish.
If Girl Stroke Boy is inferior to Villain, Making It (` X ' Carlton), is that much worse again. (My apologies to anyone who wants to go to see a new film this week.) It stars a loathsome seventeen-year-old—a part Kristoffer Tabori has no trouble playing — and his adventures in the skin trade with three pasteboard women who make him hard first and cynical afterwards. Set in an asylum which is remotely recognisable as an American high school, it is as mucky and pitiful as the abortion it ends with. The film is not, strictly speaking, obscene; but I should have no hesitation in applying that word to the people who made it.
Finally a word about some of the good films that are showing. The National Film Theatre is into the closing stages of its excellent selection of films from the 'forties; and The Wanderer, adapted from AlainFournier's novel Le Grand Meaulnes, is living up to its name by moving, after the Electric Cinema and the Paris-Pullman, to the Venus Cinema, Kentish Town.
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