Cinema
Sickness and Health
By ISABEL QUIbLY
Summerskin. (Jacey in the LEOPOLDO TORRE NILLSON is a director whose way of mixing heaving melodrama—of sub
0 ject and of style—with cool, witty, even lyrical, comment I almost unfailingly suggestive and sym-
pathetic; and his studies of murk among the Argentinian rich dovetail social and human criticism with splendid precision, irony and interest. He is one of those artists who realise that to mean anything to those outside your awn country or clique you don't have to sit down and write footnotes to every remark; in fact, that it isn't a bad idea to be local. In a sense, of course,- his plushy Argentina is Microcosmic; but socially and in the widest sense stylistically (its own style, or Torre Nillson's) it is wholly itself. S'meterskin has a story fairly oozing irony d upside-down pathos, which in damper, hotter 'ands might have been the occasion for all sorts i of covert sentimentality. Torre Nillson gives it a i hard, cool look, yet keeps it human and (as it Ought to be) dreadful : this in spite of a supremely uninteresting pair as the main charac- ters, whose lack of skill and even of charm or Presence acts as a proof, very often, of their director's skill, charm, presence and the rest of it. The tale, given the family and circumstances, Is Plausible and horrific, A young man is dying; his father's (the family ramifications are complicated: "Is father's mistress's grand-daughter) is offered 4 Year in Paris and a Dior wardrobe if she will make his last months happy. She does, love works the miracle and he is cured, comes dashing home from the hospital to say: 'Now we can be Married.' Hemmed in by the thought of marriage to a dreary youth she doesn't love, the girl blurts out the truth. Coup de lhedire, if you like; out tbe end is chillingly grisly. Torre Nillson has managed to suggest the
„
'-usParate elements in the story in an extremely subtle way: the complexity of situation in- creased, of course, by the fact that the girl is ilb, LCher a professional tart nor a wholehearted itch, and would like not to grow into what she 's obviously becoming—the image of her grand- rnOther, The diversity of outlook in the love
find affair is suggested obliquely, often with great beauty, generally with psychological effectiveness.
A witty script, by Torre Nillson's wife Beatriz Guido, loses a good deal in transit, between dull acting and subtitles; but the essential, I think,. comes across; moments like the one where a faintly lecherous old peasant says: 'You're not from these parts, are you? Your skin is so white,' which takes us back to the sick man's words about how people are segregated 'like the races' into the healthy and the sick. So script and images work together, like the landscapes, light, and states of mind.
British film musicals have been on the whole so hideously coy and unsatisfactory in the past that we got the idea .the climate just didn't suit them. But Summer Holiday refutes all that with a bang and if this year produces anything gayer, fresher, more high-spirited or simply pleasanter,' I'll be surprised. The team that made The Young Ones with Cliff. Richard in the main part and' one or two familiar faces in the cast have done, a great deal better, this time, with a thread of a story, the most amusing teenage heroine, bar Hayley Mills, for years (Lauri Peters, last and I think first seen in Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vaca- lion) and an inexhaustible Supply of friendly good humour and fun with an occasional pinch of wit. The story tells the adventures of a London bus done up as a kind of caravan by four young mechanics . and setting out for Athens, picking up .four girls, a St. Bernard dog and sixteen occasions—French, Swiss, Austrian, Yugoslay. and Greek--for song and dance on the way, and any curmudgeonly person convinced of the frightfulness of today's youth should be hauled along to the Warner Cinema for a' change of heart.
Previous page
