Television
Thanks for the memory
Clive Gammon
At some time during the last episode of The World at War (ITV), which went out last week, Laurence Olivier said, of one or another of the images of war that flickered momentarily onto the screen, "This is not the way we are used to seeing it on the newsreels." Discounting the obsolete 'newsreels' (or has the word achieved a new life, covering TV newscasts as well as Pat/se Pictorial, or whatever it used to be called?) Olivier was entirely right. The World at War has not proved to be what we are used to seeing. Against considerable odds, its makers have shown the war not to be a sucked-dry subject, and the manner in which the series was rounded off was worthy of the memorable twenty five weeks' episodes which went before it.
The theme was remembrance, portrayed orthodoxly enough by Last Posts, veterans marching by the .Cenotaph, Afrika Korps reunions, the pathetic family-album photographs of the victims of the massacre at Oradour-surGlane, the hanging bodies of partizans. But that wasn't all. Typical of the honesty of this series, there was the admission that some images of war are beautiful; parachute troops, for instance, spilling out over Nor Spectator May 18, 1974 mandy. There were images also of rest and boredom. "In a battle," a veteran observed, "most of the time you are an onlooker. Maybe only a fifth of the soldiers are involved in the fighting at one time." There were Germans milking cows, hauling carts through mud, directing traffic in Paris as well as separating women and children from the men in the first stage of an extermination camp journey. In a way, this last episode was the most impressive of all because it did what seemed almost impossible, it conveyed the universality of the war, made it plain that it was a thousand different things from the many, the 50 million, that death had undone to the unschooled curiosity of contemporary schoolchildren examining the rear gun turret of a Lancaster work.The Imperial War Museum. Altogether a magnificent piece of The emaciated Indian peasants driving hand-ploughs through dust in Bombay Superstar (BBC2) looked uncomfortably like some of the ragged Poles jostling for potatoes in The World at War. This was a Man Alive repeat of a programme I'd missed before, concerned with the extraordinarY Indian film industry which to a11 appearances seems to have slid through a time-space warp from the Hollywood of the 1920's, the participants changed only by their brown skins and Rhondda accents. The film industry in India has no tveillevgiseion rival, or not seriously. A truck pounding into a remote la holds a portable screen, lights, a projector and the newest film of Irajesh Khanna, India's Clark Gable. Or maybe John Gilbert. If the villagers like the film then they will trek fifteen miles to the nearest small town to see it again and again, six or seven times. If not, they see it just the once and that means failure.
Rajesh, the Bombay superstar, seemed an engaging, totally naive sort of man. Asked what it was about that turned Indian ladies on, he blinked his eyes in an excruciatingly lecherous way. "I think it's like that," he said. It must have something to do also with the clearly-calculated European appearance he nurtures. Since he never even gets to kiss his leading lady, on film at least, he plainly has to rely on some gimmick. The Bombay dream machine produces delectable actresses too, about whom I feel more qualified to speak, like the one whom we were told was 'noted for her pout.' To turn himself on, incidentally, Rajeesh chewed a special aphrodisiac called "Bedsmasher.' Not at all necessary, I should have thought, with that class of pout about the place. Not much, if anything, of Rajeesh's oeuvre finds it way onto Film Night (BBC2). This programme I find very irritating. I refuse to deprive myself by missing the clips of new films but to do so I have to put up with the knowingness and patronizing style of Messrs Tony Bilbow and Philip K. Jenkinson. This is a dilemma that so far I have failed to solve.
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