From bad to worse
Christopher Hudson!
This will do as well as any time to describe an average week of new releases, a fully representative cross-section of the mush being doled out month after month to cinemas up and down the land. Four films, all of them from the States although that isn't anything unusual. The first (taken in order of the press showings: there's nothing else to distinguish them), is a horror film about two boys who can communicate beyond the grave; the second is a ,glossy black version of Love Story; the third is an American-Jewish comedy about a man who falls in love with another girl on his honeymoon; and the fourth brings cops, strippers, buggies and druggies into an all-purpose parable about youth and freedom. Let's go.
The Other ('X' Carlton) has precocious twins, of ten or so, causing havoc in a respectable 1930s Connecticut farmhouse. Their Russian grandmother, wheedled by Uta Hagen, has taught them a novel kind of extra-sensory perception and this naturally disarrays them, causing them to frighten old ladies into heart attacks, push people down stairs to their deaths and generally to misbehave. The atmosphere of foreboding that surrounds their childish pranks is explained when one of the twins turns out to have
been dead all along. A run-of-the mill horror film, produced and directed by Robert Mulligan who shouldn't be frittering away his
considerable talents on such rub
bish.
A Warm December ('A' Universal) has Sidney Poitier, as an American doctor who has given up fashionable surgery to start clinics for the poor, in London on holiday with his young daughter. He falls in love with a mysterious and glamorous black girl (Esther Anderson) who, in between charming hydro-electric plants out of the Russians as an emissary of the Torundan Economic Development Council, finds time to go off with Poitier ridin', helicopterin' and country cottagin', on a scale which suggests that the good doctor makes a healthy capitalist profit out of his social conscience. Their passion is sharpend and made bitter-sweet by his discovery (" Do you mind if I give you a blood test? ") that she is sufferin' from an incurable variety of leukaemia that only attacks black people, They proceed to discover, at tedious length, that parting is such sweet sorrow. Bravely fighting back the tears, our Esther refuses Poitier's offer of marriage and goes back to negotiate with the Russians. Poitier is last seen in an aircraft heading for Washington, clutching his daughter's hand and staring, sadly yet somehow more wisely, into the future. The Heartbreak Kid ('AA' Rialto) — it should be a 'U' — has a screenplay by Neil Simon and direction by Elaine May, which augurs well. In fact it is a lengthy disappointment. Those oh-sowitty lines snap, crackle and pop: but the characters behind them are deader and sillier even than
usual, especially Kelly, the beautiful goy, who has no separate iden tity at all. Lenny, anyway, marries Lila, a Jewish-mother-to-be, and realises his mistake when Kelly
happens upon the Miami honeymoon beach (Kelly is played by The Last Picture Show girl, Cybill Shepherd, a Candice Bergen type of pasteboard blonde). Lenny:
breaks with Lila and follows Kelly back to Minneapolis. Her father hates him; Kelly seems con temptuous of him; but Lenny's determination wins him through. He marries, her, and then starts talk ing about getting back to nature. End of story: it's as pointless as that. A small-brained creature, slow-moving, a long tail and no sting at the end.
Trip to Kill ('X' Classic Chelsea) has at least the virtue of origin
ality. But the new ground it breaks isn't worth prospecting. Joe, an ex-war hero turned drop out, is framed by the Narcotics Bureau into acting as a stoolpigeon who will lead them to a hard drugs pusher called Neilson. What appears at the start to be a black comedy turns sick when Neilson's strong men start killing Joe's girlfriends messily and brutally. The part of Joe is taken by Tom Stern, who also produces and directs. His kind of paranoia is no doubt common to many young actors, but happily few of them are rich enough to turn it into a film and throw it in our faces.
The moral? Stay indoors and watch television.
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