24 MARCH 1973, Page 18

Christopher Hudson.

Hollywood, in loving memory

Fifteen or twenty films have opened in London in the past couple of weeks but a miserable few, two at the most, are worth paying money to see. One of these, Red Psalm (' X ' Academy Two) needs no introduction from me. It deals with the same period and the same theme (workers insurrection in Hungary) in much the same way as Agnus Dei which I discussed in this column a few weeks ago. I find it less satisfactory — but then the trouble with Jancso is that he turns his admirers into purists seeking in his films some sort of ideal metaphor. I can't see that Red Psalm marks any advance on the earlier film. The cavalry wheel, the soldiers parade and manoeuvre, the peasant folk dance, sing and shout slogans, as inscrutably as ever.

If there is no one quite like Miklos Jancso in the cinema, there is no one in the least like Andy Warhol. His latest film Heat (' X ' Metropole), again directed by Paul Morissey, is by turns funny, pitiful and horrifying. This time Joe Dallesandro, the Warhol star, is a washed-up former child actor who takes a room in a sleazy Hollywood motel. His passivity makes him irresistibly atractive to a weird gaggle of ladies: the grossly fat and repulsive motel keeber, a hysterical lesbian teenager who only tries to seduce him in order to spite her mother, a beached and ageing movie queen who becomes obsessed with his body. The movie-queen's ex-husband and his boyfriend and two homosexual brothers who have a nightclub act also come into the picture, but as usual it is the women who hold the stage and do most of the talking.

Paul Morissey could be described as a Gerald Scarfe of the cinema, were it not for the fact that he records, without noticeably exaggerating, the freakish idiosyncracies of real human beings. His camera moves blankly from face to face, documenting selfishness, greed, hatred, suspicion and loneliness — above all an insupportable loneliness which binds this human jetsam into an arid, loveless chain of sexual activity. Dallesandro makes love to the motel owner, caressing this female Cerberus in order to get a discount on his motel bill. He leaves the movie-queen quite callously when it becomes clear that she can't help him with television contacts; she comes after him with a gun but it doesn't fire. All the while, as they talk compulsively, ad-libbing the trivial, selfobsessed, self-pitying chatter that fills the day, Morissey's camera studies them in close-up: the puffy lips tugged down in a sneer of discontent, the dyed ringlets askew over thick makeup, the eyes shifting away, the hands plucking and picking at the face. It is the most realistic hell on earth that I have seen on film: a sunset boulevard coming from nowhere and going nowhere with its delinquent inhabitants squabbling and cursing in the dying light.

Once upon a time John Huston's films could outrage and fascinate, too. Now he makes amiably entertaining films of which the latest is The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean ('A' ABC 2), based on the legend which John Ford celebrated in an earlier film. Paul Newman is Bean, an outlaw who sets up as a hanging judge in the Texan outback and seizes enough booty from the rogues and outlaws who fall into his clutches to turn the one-shack hamlet of Vinegaroon into a prospering township. Guest appearances by Anthony Perkins, Stacy Keach, Ava Gardner, Huston himself and Jacqueline Bisset sporting a bizarre Texan accent pace out an overlong film best characterised in the theme song sung by Andy Williams — "Molasses and sugar, cinnamon and sassafras tea." A bear called Bruno awakes our interest for a bit, but its agent should have advised it to wait for a better film. A quick round-up of the others: Baxter ('AA' ABC 1) is a piece of sentimental rubbish about the nervous crisis of a twelve-year-old American lad who can't pronounce his 'r's — a farrago surprisingly directed by Lionel Jeffries who deserves better; The National Health ('AA' Columbia) is a crude adaptation of the stage play in which Jack Gold, the director, muffles the chief targets of Peter Nichols's hilarious satire by exaggerating the fantasy sequences — although he can't muffle the remarkable comic performance of Colin Blakely; Bhiebeard ('X ) and Sex Shop (' X ') are a double-bill of unmitigated tripe at the Continenta1e: go next door to see again Love in the Afternoon at the Berkeley; Two Lane Black Top ('A' Screen on the Green) is a pretentious and silly film about a race between an expensive Pontiac and a tuned-up old Cadillac, in which the contest is also for the favours of a sexy girl hitchhiker, who sensibly leaves both sides and rides off pillion on a motorbike; Uncle Torn (' X ' Cinecenta) is an appalling compilation film about slavery from the makers of Mondo Cane, ostensibly illustrating its evils but in reality as racially prejudiced and prejudicial a film as I have seen. Finally, at the New Victoria, a double bill of substandard horror films, Psychomania (' X ') and The Baby X '). The Baby, about a grown-up man kept childlike and penned in a nursery by his mother and sisters, is a genuine curiosity with some quite nasty moments in it, but Psychomania, about a motorcycle gang who kill themselves in the belief that they rise invincible from the dead, is only notable for its casting of George Sanders in what must have been his last, and most inappropriate, role, as Beryl Reid's butler.