Cinem a

The Frail and the Frigid

By IAN CAMERON IN the obstacle race of film- making, best-sellers are an invaluable aid in completing the course. In almost every other way, the director who the power to take only what he wants from

Exodus or Advise and Consent, he will be bound to reproduce the details and even the spirit of the

cmginal. Now the average best-seller is a pretty tawdry item, a calculated mixture of spurious shocks and prurient thrills. Only if he is very shrewd or very lucky will a director get the chance to turn the corruptness of the original

back against itself, as Robert Aldrich did with SPillane's Kiss Me Deadly. The great, rambling Plots have to be simplified to (sometimes from)

the point of incoherence, particularly as the hornier hunks of action are ruled out for the cinema.

The preamble is necessary in writing about a film like The Chapman Report ('X' certificate). One cannot blame the deficiencies of the story or even of the dialogue, which was often lifted from the book, on The director, George Cukor. The uncompromisingly frank dramatisation of

Irving Wallace's sensational best-seller about the Personal story behind a Kinsey-type survey of

the sex life of the American female' contains a generous ration of pluff. Like most of its kind, it tries to cover all the angles: the four women

who are the central characters are oh so care- fully contrasted. A nymphomaniac, alcoholic divorctIe (Claire Bloom), A frigid, father- dominated widow (Jane Fonda). An art dealer's

wife (Glynis Johns) who really loves her hus- band. A builder's wife (Shelley Winters) who thinks she loves her lover. The framework may be conceived on a con- sistent level of banality, but within it one can see Cukor's intelligence at work. It would be too

easy, for example, to present the opponents of Dr. Chapman's survey as prudish idiots, or alternatively to attack the idea of this sort of statistical investigation. But Chapman comes

across as an honest, hard-working man, and his

ma1° opponent makes perfectly sane and valid objections. The Chapman Report is completely free of that special tone of voice adopted by actors when they and the director know that they aor,e saying something shocking. 'Ten per cent. the married women were strongly aroused, "bi Per cent. somewhat . . .' says the hero even detachment, the titles, but he says it with a complete nvetachment, which is taken up by the inter- ice. wers. Cukor is remarkably good at his 1/enlists. Chapman is a little too quick to dismiss ‘..1" 013Ponent's moral objections when they _worry his assistant: 'Don't let him throw you, Pauli There is even more acute observation in

s. callous satisfaction at knowing he is right I his diagnosis of the motives behind the laYmPho's suicide. But where Cukor really excels is in the direction of the actresses. And that is to be ex- pected, for he is one of the greatest directors of women: Judy Garland, Sophia Loren, Kay Kendall, Judy Holliday. Ava Gardner and many more have given their best performances under him. The virtues of The Chapman Report lie almost in the direction of the actresses. It's not just that they perform well within the limits of the script : Cukor's conception of the characters goes deeper. A film which is usually weak in structure and often marvellous in detail pro- duces particular difficulties for a critic who wants to praise it. How easy it is to pick on the faults and how hard to describe the virtues. Without minute description, how can one convey the marvellous detailing? One remembers not the story, the sensational details, but the touching way Jane Fonda's hand bends back in an em- brace when she suddenly feels frightened by physical intimacy, or the slightly-too-loud `Hullo' which reveals her nervousness when she greets the interviewer who has previously driven her to the point of desperation with his questions. And there is a night-club scene where Claire Bloom exchanges hungry, complicit glances with the clarinettist whose gestures with his instru- ment are openly sexual. It seems less than justice to pack all this into one brief sentence and say that Fonda, Winters, and especially Bloom give remarkable performances.

The only really regrettable aspect of the direction is the obvious invitation to sneer at Glynis Johns's twittering aesthete, who is so patently there to be laughed at. Few films can match the ravishing colour (photographed by Harold Lipstein), used to tremendous effect in the hopeless browns that characterise Claire Bloom.

Finally, though, The Chapman Report sur- vives through its acting and is best where the acting is given fullest rein—in the Chapman interviews. The camera concentrates on the women being torn apart by the dispassionate and apparently inexorable questions fired from off-screen, questions which are always followed by a forbidding list of the possible answers. The concentration would be complete but for the intervention of the censor, whose cuts, mainly in dialogue, are both obtrusive and pointless. One would have thought that in an `X' film, few of the audience are likely to get corrupting thrills from plain dialogue. But still the censor can't keep his sticky fingers off. Who is he trying to protect? From the reactions of the critics, one presumes it must be them. Seventy-five per cent. of the critics were strongly aroused, 25 per cent. somewhat.