Cinema
Fantasies
Kenneth Robinson
The Bawdy Adventures of Torn Jones Director: Cliff Owen. Stars: Nicky Henson, Geraldine McEwan, Georgia Brown, Arthur Lowe, Trevor Howard. 'X' Empire (95 mins).
The Sunshine Boys Director: Herbert Ross Stars: Walter Matthau, George Burns 'A' ABC, Shaftesbury Avenue (110 mins).
Sometimes I suspect myself of being a philistine at heart. As I sat in the Empire, Leicester Square, thinking that this re-vamped building is now even more like a huge pleasure-dome, I realised that The Bawdy Adventures of Tom Jones suited not only the architecture but my mood as well. Perhaps the building actually produced the mood. In this vast, cavernous edifice you don't expect subtlety. And with Torn Jones you certainly don't get it, apart from qne or two asides by the superb Arthur Lowe, as Dr Thwacker. This is a film to take your ice-cream to and, perhaps, a thinking girl who doesn't mind not thinking occasionally. It's the sort of film usually described as 'undemanding' or 'a romp', and I'm not quite sure why I seem to be limping to its defence. I think it's because it provides, like genuine Restoration comedy, an escape that a lot of people need. It presents a make-believe world where all wives are grotesque and all maidens are prepared not to be maidens.
I've never responded well to the psychiatrists I've encountered not on their couches, but at the microphone who have wanted to probe my fantasies. I don't really think I have any. But if I did have some they might include this film's highwaywoman more than its countess. I've no secret longing for the peasant hut, where Tom Jones (Nicky Henson) meets yet another of his enthusiasts. But I'm a sucker for any story its? which the supposedly ill-born turns out to be well-born. And I don't need a psychoanalyst ta tell me that people who like this kind of story do so because they know that power lies in wealth and position.
There are dreadful jokes in this distant relation of Henry Fielding's novel. But at least they are dreadful jokes for everybody, from the collapsing bed to the single entendre, which is never good enough to be double. But there is nothing tawdry or amateur about the production. The costumes, the settings and the players are really very satisfactory. And some of the casting is more than that. Especially among the dreadful old ladies, whose appearance hints at the obscenities of old age that none of us dares to admit openly, largely because we are on the way to it ourselves.
Old age is very much the subject of The Sunshine Boys. It's a pity that Walter Matthau: and George Burns got so much publicity: before their film even opened. For me they nearly killed the picture in advance with their Parkinson interview. It was here that Mr Matthau insisted on showing how he did funny. walks that were based on his mother. And embarrassing though these were, they were a' good deal better than much of the film. So was Mr Matthau's genuinely warm affection for eighty-year-old George Burns. And at this point I must stop myself from falling into a trap.' Actors, I must remind myself, are actors are actors. They are never warm and lovable. But they have to appear to be more warm and lovable than the rest of us, just to conceal the. fear they live with.
And that brings me to a point in the film's: favour. Matthau and George Burns do at last play a pair of veteran comics who openly dislike' each other. They have survived forty-three' years in vaudeville, doing the same routine. But' Al Lewis (Burns) has retired, leaving Willy' Clark (Mattau) lost and disconcerted. The story' tells of their reunion, first for a television' nostalgia-show and then for an eventide in the same home for old actors.
For me the best thing about this film is the awful and accurate view it gives of the television world, which is always death to the kind of creativity produced in stage-work. And the worst thing about the film is the way the director, Herbert Ross, and the writer, Neil Simon, have made the old characters appear both funny-ha-ha and funny-peculiar. There's a bit too much of the Mr Magoo approach asking for laughs at the expense of senility. But even worse are the moments of pathos that fail to come off.
I don't mind the direct guying of old folk, as in the Tom Jones film. But I don't like having. my withers wrung at the same time.
There are two things wrong with this picture.: First, we ought to have seen the veteran , comedians in their original act, not just re-creating it for television. And second, I don't, like a show-business film that doesn't make me: feel there's no business like it. I know it isn't true. But I like to believe in the fantasy world of the stage just as much as the fantasy world of Henry Fielding's follies.
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