Cinema
Locked In
By ISABEL QUIGLY
Strongroom and Two and Two Make Six. (Leicester Square Theatre.) IN a week as flat as the fens even a molehill of talent looks sizeable, and of the Bryanston company's two very small-scale films put out together in the same programme, Strongroom (director: Vernon Sewell; 'A' certificate) has the kind of cinematic suspense that, going straight back to The Perils of Pauline and beyond, keeps you not quite on the edge of your seat, perhaps, but at least agree- ably involved with the mechanics of how it's done and how it's likely to turn out.
Old hands at filmgoing will guess pretty well everything in advance: they'll know that when people are locked in a bank's strongroom by three panicky burglars (Derren Nesbitt, the blackmailer in Victim, is their leader) everything outside will combine to frustrate their rescue. It will be Easter weekend, with everyone off tili Tuesday and everyone out when you tele- phone, the chars who hear tapping will think it's the bike-shop next door, the burglar who is to ring the police and leave the keys about for them will be killed in a car crash, the keys will go the rounds of deadly slow policemen and garrulous old boys in the morgue, the burglars who finally decide on rescue will be short of fuel for their flame-thrower, and every sort of muddle and delay will pile up to tangle the simple operation of opening a door before the supply of oxygen runs out inside.
And all the time, of course, while the audience goes steadily just a little bit mad at the frustra- tions, we keep cutting to the inside of the strong- room, where the stuffy bank manager and the pretty typist (Colin Gordon and Ann Lynn) are actually on first-name terms at last, and their efforts to bore through the concrete floor into a pipe only get them to the wrong pipe and nearly flooded. Yes, this is all filmish and neat, and there's even a surprise at the very last minute, which I won't give away: just why the rescued pair don't, as all the traditions insist they ought to, get married after all.
Two and Two Make Six (director: Freddie Francis; 'A' certificate) is an appallingly arch nationalistic joke about an American service- man on the run with an English girl (or two), made with a clear eye cocked to the American market, and plenty of pubs, Shakespeare-spout- ing drunks, girls' boarding schools and chat about baseball on the one hand and cricket on the other. Janette Scott is the girl, George Chakiris (the Puerto Rican gang leader in West Side Story) the boy, Athene Seyler has strayed in somehow, and a good squirm of embarrass- ment is had by all.
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