VIOLENT SATURDAY (Rialio)—.--THE LOVERS OF LISBON (Carnet) - Poly)—SHAN-F0 AND
YINO-TAI (Berkeley).
Violent Saturday is an extremely well con- structed thriller directed by Richard Fleischer. It is the ,story of a bank robbery in a small American town, the main theme and its sub- sidiaries dove-tailing as smoothly and neatly as the scams in a SaVile Row suit. The robbers, Stephen McNally, Carroll Naish and Lee Marvin, quiet and respectable-looking, soft- spoken and polite, are, by the very lack of any- thing sinister in their behaviour, extraordinarily convincing. Professionals, doing their job with efficiency and the minimum of fuss, they are characters in whom one can wholeheartedly believe. Threaded through their plans to steal a car, rob the bank, take the money to a farm house owned by Amish farmers—the latter are useful as their religion forbids all use of mechanical contrivances such as the telephone —are snippets of their victims' lives, troubled, of course, as are all lives. There is the drunk tycoon and, his unfaithful wife, the nurse who loves him, the peeping-Tom bank manager, the librarian who steals money to pay her debts, and the father whose boy despises him for not winning a war medal. All are excellent, in particular Richard Egan as the tippler and Victor Mature as the soon-to-be-heroic father giving tine performances. What might have been a patchy business has been skilfully con- joined, good dialogue, characterisation and editing working together to make a wonderfully refreshing version of a by no means original tale.
direction by Henri Verneuil and some excellent photography cannot blind one to the film's basic futility.
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The Chinese film at the Berkeley, which is an opera sung and acted by students round one of those sad, seventh-century, romantic legends of theirs, must depend, for its apprecia- tion, on the individual. Personally I was pulled in two by the perfect beauty of the scenes and costumes and the perfect agony of the music. My ear can stand so much and no more of that shrill nasal twanging, variations on five notes sung with a • heavy head cold losing their piquancy in next to no time. Would that my eye were as sensitive as my ear, for here the colours and patterns are ravishing; but they could not retrieve the gradual disintegration of my nerves, and I did not stay the course but ran, whimper- ing a little, into the Tottenham Court Road. My narrow musical education is to be deplored and I can only apologise profoundly to the Chinese people for failing to judge their film
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