15 JULY 1960, Page 20

Cinema

Object Lessons

By ISABEL QUIGLY Inherit the Wind. (As- toria.)—Beat, Square and Cool. (National Film Theatre.) — The Artist Speaks. (BBC television.) You get lean weeks and full weeks and this is a full week. There is, first, Stanley Kramer's film he was talking about when he was in London for On the Beach: this is Inherit the Wind and it confirms Mr. Kramer as the versatile man he is, full of object lessons for the world; this time a forceful one about the right to think. Deep down in Tennessee during the Twenties a schoolteacher was tried under a State law that forbade anyone to teach anything but a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible; which established the right to teach that the world didn't, as the fundamentalists said, start abruptly at nine o'clock one fine morn- ing in about 4000 tic.

Mr. Kramer, of course, isn't talking basically about the ludicrous details of religious fanaticism in a particular place, any more than a film about the freedom of the printed word would be, sup- posing the story was set there, basically about Swindon Public Library (to take a particularly ludicrous example) as such; but about the efforts of people in this century or any other to go where their minds can take them; to dare the consequences of thought, not to say: 'I'll burn my books,' not to toe the party line in religion, politics or anything else. And the difficulty is. how to say this. If you have a McCarthy, a Torquemada or a Stalin on the one hand, it's easy enough to know where sympathy lies; but Mr. Kramer wants a more equal contest, a trial of strength (character as well as intellect) be- tween two men, even if not two causes, you can sympathise with. He wants, too, to build up the sort of climate in which religious in- tolerance is the natural background of people's lives; a tight, small world in which you have to conform because the nonconformist's outside world doesn't count. 'Here's where my children will grow up,' says the girl who is to marry the schoolmaster arrested for a bit of Darwinism in biology classes; meaning: conform, or they'll suffer. And to -a tight, small community the outside world doesn't, can't, matter very much. It takes a big soul to care more about world- wide sympathy than backyard hatred. Like the trade unionist in The Angry Silence, the man Suffers for his immediate surroundings, the friends and family that turn on him, the familiar life that seems the only one yet becomes im- possible to live.

The two lawyers who symbolise the conflict are old friends. At first this seems unlikely, if not impossible; and I'm not sure that (although in real life, between the real lawyers in the real trial, it existed) I ever really believed in their old acquaintance. Fredric March is the funda- mentalist prosecutor, Spencer Tracy the (in all senses) free-thinking defence, the first bald, the second white-haired, both thick and ageing. And between them is the cynical newspaperman (Gene Kelly), who believes in nothing and turns out to be the real villain of the piece, the empty soul. Much of the action takes place in the courtroom and a fairly preposterous place that is: the prosecutor, being a local hero, has been made honorary colonel of the local militia; the defence, objecting that it gives him unfair mili- tary prestige, is made a temporary honorary colonel to keep the balance. Defence witnesses (eminent biologists, anthropologists, archeolo- gists) are rejected as irrelevant to the case. But gradually the defence builds up and goes over to the attack, the fundamentalists are shown up as not just cranky but crazily intolerant, and the prosecutor (after some shady tricks, in and out of court) cracks up spiritually and emotionally till he ends sobbing all over his wife, calling, 'Mother,' while she murmurs: 'Baby, baby.' This is the sort of scene that a few years ago just wouldn't have happened, for there used to be a much tighter unofficial censorship of what was or wasn't 'done,' a censorship not of violence or sexuality but simply of what was psychologically embarrassing (and in British films embarrassment is still a pretty obtrusive censor). I remember the shock when I first saw a man cry in a film (it was Charles Boyer). Cine- matically speaking, this just didn't happen. And a few years ago I defy you to find, in a Holly- wood film, a bald, stout, sixtyish man called 'baby,' or its equivalent in embarrassment- potential. Of course, there are film conventions of what happens in situations we all know don't happen like that (British films score here again), but things are easing, widening. accepting more all the time; accepting that people in general are a lot more unexpected than you might ex- pect, and things (as I felt last week about the lifelike upsidedownness of the courtship in Wild River), altogether less calculable, plottable, pigeonholeable.

Beat, Square and Cool is the title of a series that starts this week at the National Film Theatre and goes on till August 14, showing a number of American films made either by the New York independents (the staid BFI pro- gramme talks of 'hot or cool, hep or square, off-beat, beat or "way-out" ') or by Hollywood B-grade film makers who have attracted enough outside attention to be called (with the New Yorkers) part of a 'new wave.' The series starts with a blast from the avant-garde and it comes as a shock (if you are waiting to be shocked, or at least jolted) that avant-garde ideas, tags or even images don't necessarily make for avant- garde filming. Pull my Daisy (directors: Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie), for instance, an effort at 'beat on film,' in spite of the amazing fluency of Jack Kerouac's scenario (delivered off the cuff in a kind of trance, it seems) and the almost equally amazing fluency of everyone else around the unswept flat and unwashed teacups (Allen Ginsberg is one of the three starred poets who could walk upside down on the ceiling, you feel, with perfect ease if they tried), seems to me pretty conventional as a /dm. If it were put on as what it is, an entertaining enough effort to get across a particular social atmosphere, I'd say fine; but phrases like 'This is Zen on film' (to quote the programme again) just make me want to ask what, what, what do they know about Zen—the programme-writer, the film- makers, the beatniks, the lot?

Am I right in thinking that visual artists, or predominantly 'visual' people of any sprt, aren't as a rule good with words? Because inevitably there are things, let's admit, that are unword- able; words being only one of the many media of communication. So,. after all this, The Artist Speaks, a BBC television film series produced by John Read, is bound to be a half-cock, con- tradictory business, since the artists talk about their work and themselves, which in itself tends to be contradictory. I shan't apologise for tres- passing on to television ground, because they are highly interesting as films-in-themselves, and obviously their interest and life-span won't be confined to Mondays-in-July-and-August-1960. This is something basically, usefully cinematic: the artist at work trying, with the voice and the visual image, to explain what he is up to, and why, and what his attitudes are to it, to the world, to things: self-portraiture in and through work, which, in this very untricksy, straight- forward way, is new as far as I know. Clouzot's Picasso film was more dazzling, but it seems a cheat by the side of these honest efforts at an impossible degree of communication: Artist never spoke to layman so simply without patronage.