22 MAY 1976, Page 27

Cinema

Bad habits

Ian Cameron

A perennial problem in writing about a medium which records, adapts or purloins its material as widely and freely as the cinema is simple lack of knowledge. Bluffing —the popular solution—brings the risk of exposure, and hasty trips to the library may provide superficial help but will not equip one to deal with the complexities of unfamiliar cultural backgrounds. It is sometimes better to come clean.

I know very little about Peking opera, Chinese history, Zen Buddhism, oriental martial arts, and not much more about the Hongkong film industry. Hence, I shall not join at length in the chorus of praise for King Hu's A Touch of Zen (Screen, Islington, AA certificate) although I do concur with it. From a viewpoint of general ignorance, I found it entertaining, even exhilarating. The first three-quarters of an hour drag a little, but after the bodies have started flying through the air, the remaining two hours fairly flash along.

What does trouble me, though, is the idea quoted from the Times in the film's advertising that it is the first true masterwork of the Hongkong cinema. Apart from the sneaky technicality that A Touch of Zen was actually made in Taiwan, this is the sort of statement which helps explain the sheer inaccuracy of most histories of the cinema. For the sake of correctness, it should be said that the Hongkong cinema (with relations in Taiwan and Singapore) has been enormously productive and there are those who see great merit in some of its products. However, most of its films are unknown to British critics because they have not had the benefit of press screenings here. A Touch of Zen is unlike its predecessors in arriving clearly labelled as Art. The cultural gap, however, makes it pretty resistant to appreciation on any deeper level than just as fun.

As fun, it will do nicely, which is more than I can say for Hollywood Cowboy (Plaza One, certificate A). It must have seemed lovely at script conferences—aspiring Western novelist in the early 'thirties finds himself acting in Poverty Row horse operas—it would have nostalgia, charm, comedy, action. All of these are identifiable in the finished film and are joined to a modesty of scale and an obvious affection for the setting that make it an attractive enterprise. But in spite of the presence of such skilled and likeable actors as Jeff Bridges and Andy Griffith, I found myself uninvolved almost to the point of boredom. All it seems to communicate is a lack of motivation beyond a feeling that it would be pleasant to make; the result is a terminal case of slackness.

Unfortunately, passionate commitment is not a sure recipe for success. Film directors'

most cherished projects, made after years of effort, often turn out to be far from their best work. Francois Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 is only one of many examples; another is Georges Franju's The Sin of Father Mouret (Berkeley One, X certificate). One of the finest of all documentary directors, Franju was talking about the Zola novel as a pet project about a decade before he finally filmed it. In the interim, he made other features includingJudex, the most poignant of all celebrations of the early cinema.

A constant attraction for Franju would have been the vigorously anticlerical side of the story. To a director for whom 'anything said against the military and the priesthood is well said', this clash between nature and religion must have offered irresistible possibilities. The sickly young priest with no congregation and a fixation on the Virgin Mary that is not purely religious is contrasted with a hard-bitten monk whose main weapon against peasants brutalised by their poverty is the promise of hell-fire. Through them, Franju presents his hostility to the Roman Catholic Church with great relish: the monk makes his young pupils name a deadly sin each, caning their hands as they recite. The audience is as pleased as the director when one of the monk's ears is lopped off with a pocket knife.

Against the big negative of religion, the positive of nature comes across less powerfully. Nature imagery in the cinema can turn only too easily into cliché. The problem here lies in the heroine, a girl who has spent her life running wild in an overgrown garden. Perhaps Franju's original scriptwriter, the poet Jacques Prevert, and his ideal star, the young Brigitte Bardot, could have made her more than just fey. While it is perfectly credible that the temporarily amnesiac priest should fall in love with such a soppy item, the vision of happiness stays at the level of its personification. The biblically eclectic idea of a seductive Virgin Mary in a secular Garden of Eden appears as pretty as a calendar picture, but altogether too frail to survive even the slightest lack of sympathy from the audience. Franju's dream movie is a disappointment, but a very considerable film nonetheless.