Cinema
The film with everything
,Duncan Fallowell
Go/d. Director: Peter Hunt. Stars: Roger Moore, Susannah York, Ray Milland, 'A' Odeon Leicester .Square (122 minutes).
The Dance of Love. Director: Otto Shenk. Stars: Maria Schneider, Helmut Berger. 'X' Cinecenta Panton Street. (108 minutes).
Boy's Own Paper rides again: The Hero Sahib, schooled at St Dominic's, educated in the nets, mettled at the North-West Frontier, withdrew, one might say, panic-stricken during the 'fifties and 'sixties (something about an angry young man and this sex revolution thing, so that one could not go to bed with a good book like Biggles any more): but now that his country needs him again, all right, no hard feelings, he's back. In the form of Roger Moore, in fact, whose accent may be slightly ever-so-dodgy but he does have the profile of a first-class bat and his hair goes yellow on the veldt.
It is not quite what it was, admittedly. J. Bond has happened too. So now the hero, even when he is more respectably clinical than that beastly highlander, has a turquoise sports job with girl to match, quadraphonic stereo in the fridge, a rootless combination of old world charm and mid-Atlantic repartee, and lives in a flat which shimmers in an obfuscation of wickedly bad taste at the top of something called 'Majestic Towers' in the whitest part of JO'burg,
Mobiles in the lounge, tartan carpet on the stair, champagne in the bedroom going chink-chink, the lot. And since this is the 'seventies after all, well, put him underground for the time being and get him to do something useful, like dig up gold and be the dupe of international financier crooks. Enter John Gielgud incomparably evil in pinstripes who in the shadow of Nelson's Column is master
minding a very ugly plan to freethe price of bullion, basically just turning himself a phenomenal fortune and incidental fortunes for other members of the baddy eleven (such as a shiekh in shades and an incompetent German industrialist who is blown up, in an outstandingly rotten sequence, by a parcel bomb on Christmas Day — so much for honour among thieves, but appropriate to fight-dirty baddy lore).
Gold is the bullion -world's very own Beyond The Valley of The Dolls and more, no kidding, and for absolute epic kitsch Beverly Hills is way behind the houses and lodges of the South African mine owners (Ray Milland, plus scions, sounding very non-local when he blurts out "You bet your arse I will!") where, one suspects, even the loo paper is tooled in gold leaf. There are self-parodying elements in it throughout, particularly in the romance scenes with Susannah York, although the only time that Peter Hunt's direction noticeably falters is also here when some long metaphor about "God bless this ship and all who sail in her, may she be torpedoed many times, etc." becomes idiotically cute.
But it ends there by no means. This is an action-packed loin-gripper of a film, it is very exciting. If you are not chuckling over some delicious piece of tongue-in-cheek it is probably because your heart is in your mouth, for Gielgud's foul scheme involves drowning out a key mine and I think we all suffer, ultimately, from aquaphobia. If you disagree, now is the time to put it to the test. Throughout it all Roger Moore behaves like an ace, you just know he won his first Duke of Edinburgh Award at the age of two and grew up somewhere near the Severn Bore. At the climax there is even a union of mankind — some things are bigger than apartheid — as Roger and the leader of the Zulu workers go down to save the mine from irreparable inundation, as the synopsis put it, "in a desperate gamble from which only one of them will emerge alive." Well, I don't have to tell you who eventually comes out in his smudged bri-nylon jump suit to marry the boss's granddaughter, having saved the lives of a thou sand black miners, since the BOP has already told us that. That's right, it is Trevor Howard (alias Roger Moore on a stretcher). And the baddies? They mow each other down with Rolls Royces out of sheer pique, a great moment from a film which has many. And the blacks? They just hack at ore and mill about looking concerned, but Hunt does slip in some sharp Evelyn Waugh wit when Uncle Tom is presented with a gold helmet by Sir Bountiful Milland for services rendered. This is family entertainment with a vengeance and since they did not stick on an extra 'A' this really is little Johnny's big chance. Let's hear it for the director. Hip hip
The Dance of Love, about A making it with B, B with C, C with D, which eventually brings us back to A as the song says, is more inane than it sounds. I cannot remember which letter is Maria Schneider, except that she is still the sexy tramp of Last Tango only this time in a corset, for the film is set in the age of Maupassant. Nor can I remember which letter Helmut Berger is — they meet, of course, at one stage — except that he is miscast as the Son of the House, having fattened and aged quite uncannily since I last saw him. Few of the episodes come alight, and then only briefly, so that if you have to see something continental at present I suggest you look elsewhere. There is plenty of it about.
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