Cinema
Travelling light
Christopher Hudson
The only film of George Cukor's which Graham Greene reviewed — Romeo and Juliet in 1936 — he described as "unimaginative certainly, coarse-grained, a little banal." Cukor has now repaid the compliment by filming Greene's most recent entertainment, apart from A Sort Of Life which may be said to fall into that category. It would be possible to apply Greene's description to Travels with My Aunt (' AA' Odeon, Leicester Square) inasmuch as Cukor has come up with a baldly literal, unadventurous adaptation of the story, but the most severe critic would have to concede that the result is a delightfully watchable piece of cinema.
This is chiefly due to the performance of Maggie Smith 'in a role which might have been written for her. Aunt Augusta is a way:out version of all those formidable ladies of indeterminate age whose vague, vacillating woolliness conceals a ruthless determination and a mind as sharp as a hatpin. She lives above a pub in St Martin's Lane with a black sorcerer called Wordsworth, and goes on her travels to find one hundred thousand dollars in order to ransom Mr Visconti, a former lover of hers who has been kidnapped.. Her reluctant companion is Henry Pulling, a retired bank manager who cultivated dahlias, until Augusta, whose interest is more than auntly, plucks him out of his suburban semi-detached and sets him to conniving at currency smuggling and the theft of an Old Master in a mad dash between London, Paris, Milan and Istanbul to raise the ransom money.
As usual with Greene, it is a journey without maps. All Henry's guidelines in life — good manners, reasonab.c.mess, doing the decent thing — are corrupted away and dissolve in the face of Augusta's relentless expediency. When he tells her that he has realised from an early age that you get out of Me exactly what you put into it and no more, it won't wash with Aunt Augusta. "My dear boy," cries Maggie Smith, her voice rising in that querulous wail, the long hands f:uttering in the air, "you don't realise, you are here to get out of life what other people put into it." It is a superbly comic achievement, and Cukor who has been getting remarkable performances out of his leading ladies since Garbo in Camille and Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story, deserves some credit for it. A predictably fine performance by Alec McCowen as Henry Pulling, and first-rate photography by Douglas Slocombe and set design by John Box, round off a very enjoyable film. But read the book, if you haven't already: it's funnier still.
TO the Classic Poly for a brief run comes an oddly fascinating Japanese film Summer Soldiers ('X '). The soldiers are deserters from the US military bases in Japan, and the film recounts in a documentary style the experiences of two of them, Jim 'and Miguel, as they hide with one Japanese family after another.
Nothing I have read illustrates quite so starkly and simply as Summer Soldiers the discord between two such ways of life when arbitrarily they are yoked together. The Japanese families are torn between fear of and pity for the Americans. We see them through their eyes as physically large, bumbling, rather simple creatures who must nevertheless Fee accorded respect and courtesy as representatives of an alien, mysterious civilisation. They feel great curiosity, but refrain from showing towards their guests anything more intimate than a detached kindliness. Jon and 'Miguel, meanwhile, are seen through our Western eyes as victims of circumstance, weak, powerless, incapable of asserting themselves except in the sexual act, and happiest dreaming of American pie.
A Western critic at this point is hard put to it to analyse the genuineness of the confrontation, because he can't tell — at least I can't — whether director Hiroshi Teshigahara is being deliberately ironic in his representation of the two Americans, or is presenting them as realistically as he knows how. I am inclined to believe the second. Either way, the two GIs make a perfect foil for the quick, fastidious, nimble-witted Japanese. One comes away all the more convinced of the gulf — of negligence and disinterest as much as plain ignorance — which is as unbridgeable in South-East Asia as it is in the Far East.
Previous page
