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Come back Snow White, all is forgiven
CHRISTOPHER HUDSON
The Daily Mirror editorialised last week about the disgusting trends in present-day films, instancing Myra Breckinridge (trans- sexuality), Assault (schoolgirl rape). Percy (a penis transplant) and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (everything) as the kind of salacious, pornographic filth that is being run through cinema projectors all over the country. Why can't we have films which treat sex decently? it cried. Why can't we have more films like Women in Love?
The unfortunate truth is that if porno- graphy is what corrupts by arousing illicit, that is, sexual, desires, then Women in Love is infinitely more pornographic than any of the films under review. None of these is likely to chew away surreptitiously at your moral fibre; especially since the only remotely serious one is Assault (x, Leicester Square Theatre) in which the un- speakable rapist is electrocuted and burnt to a frazzle before our satisfied gaze.
Added to which, the dialogue is limp, and the characterisation not such as to involve us even distantly in the serious issue. Two girls are raped, and the second one killed in the sight of their art mistress, who can only say, on the witness-stand, 'he looked exactly like the Devil', which com- plicates the investigation. Frank Finlay as the Det Chief Supt puts in a capably gritty, bustling performance, and as the art mis- tress, Suzy Kendall at least moves well. James Laurenson plays the young doctor who fancies himself as a psychologist and interferes, as psychologists will, with stupid remarks like 'Look for an older man, a psychotic, living alone with no witnesses to his behaviour patterns'. I ask you.
Now for the funnies. Russ Meyer used to direct minor nudie films, until he was taken up. by Twentieth Century-Fox and told to produce a major nudie film. The result, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (x, Carlton), is not to be missed. Staggered by the inane completeness of Meyer's butts-and-boobs world, I Went to see his earlier film, Vixen (x, on sporadic release in the London area), which was a mistake. But Dolls is an hilarious, bangabout farce which only a neanderthal could respond to with any seriousness. To describe it. I am forced, this once, to rely on the production hand-out: 'An uninhibited all-girl, hard-rock trio consisting of Kelly, Casey and Pet, man- aged by Harris, who also doubles as Kelly's lover, comes from the East to Hollywood where Kelly has an aunt, Susan Lake, inheritor of the family for- tune on which Kelly has some claim. During the course of their ascent to the heights of the rock music world, the girl trio become involved with an expanded cast of characters: Ronnie "Z-man" Band, a strange personality but a gifted promoter; Lance Rocke, a half actor/half gigolo; a lesbian designer, Roxanne; a crooked lawyer, Porter Hall; Ashley St Ives, a reigning cinema sex queen whose research methods are subjective; Emerson Thorne, a law student; and Randy Black, a champion boxer. Ensues a variety of eight couplings and uncouplings, includ- ing the aberrational, stimulated by such agents as pot, pills, peyote and liquor. It all ends in a terrible multiple murder which shocks the survivors into the real- isation they have been steering from the wrong charts.'
This sounds unpleasant, but it is all about as close to reality as Pyjama Tops, and therefore Merely farcical. Everything bulges, sways, glitters, wiggles or goes bump in the night. The plastic dollies step, freshly two-dimensional, out of the pages of Playboy. Conversation is carried on in cant phrases (`right on') plucked ('groovy baby') arbitrarily from several generations of hippie speech, and invitations to sex in- clude 'let's cool it. chick' and 'why don't you lose your laundry, Porter?' At one point the hero cries shakily, 'This is my first time in a Rolls!' At the end, the camera dwells on each character in turn, and a moral homily is delivered about his or her progress toward self-realisation; and we are left with the exhortation, 'If love is with you, then gentle will be all your steps, as you walk beyond the valley'. 1 hope Russ Meyer becomes a cult-figure he deserves a fate like that.
In Percy (x, ABC 2) the joke is mort intentional, and goes on about an hour to long. Hywel Bennett plays the poor unfor. tunate who is supplied with someone else'. member and spends the rest of the fillm testing its virility and trying to find the partner of the original owner. There arc a few funny moments, especially near the be- gining when the joke still has point, but as the point gets blunted, the laughs get fewer.
A rather better film, from the States, is The Landlord (x. Prince Charles) which tells amusingly, and occasionally sadly, how the good-natured, white son of a rich family takes over a Harlem tenement and tries to get on with its black inhabitants. The situation is set up with accuracy and humour, but the film, somewhere along the line, takes a wrong turning and gets en- meshed in implausible coincidences. All the same, I've yet to see an American film that deals adequately with the colour issue, and this comes as close as any.
Underground sex is, as they say, another bag. I have seen several underground films recently. and. with few exceptions, they have been so boring and unimaginative as to be almost physically unwatchable. Stew Dwoskin's Times For (The Place, 2 March. members only) is supposed to be a celebra- tion of love, 'ritual enactments of skin and psyche' between a man and four women. but for most of its length it might as well have been run backwards. The shots are desperately contrived, often perversely un- focused and subliminal. Fragments of leg. hair and gauze curtain flicker in front of the eye like specimens out of a medical museum. The music is worst of all : an ear-splitting monotonous moan which occasionally rises to an ear-splitting monotonous screech. Jonas Mekas in the Village Voice called the whole thing 'an original and solid work of erotic cinema'. If this is erotic cinema, give me Walt Disney. Conie back Snow White, all is forgiven.
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