On the other hand, the resident company comes very well
out of the evening. Jeannette Sinclair, as the vixenish innkeeper who fails to get her man, gives a clever study of meanness and
Cinema
The Film's
London Film Festival. (National Film Thea- tre.) — Night Heat. (Continentale.) — The Criminal. (Plaza.)
IF you think the film's the thing, then the Lon- don festival beats the rest. I have just sent its programme to a festival- going friend of mine, to show how unnecessary all those summer jour- neys are when one, to a rainy London autumn, pretty well covers everything. And some out- siders that weren't shown at festivals anywhere. (Everything, of course, except the mink bikinis, the gondolas, the weather, the social high jinks.) The London Film Festival goes out and gets what's made most excitement (not necessarily won most prizes) at the year's other festivals, and a remarkable international collection it is. There are one or two obvious gaps—La Dolce Vita, for instance—but mostly these are films which are turning up here in any case pretty
By ISABEL QU1GLY
the Thing
soon; and, although the festival, while open to the public, has been so heavily booked in advance that few of the public could really expect to stroll in, it is cheering to know (for the sake of the ill-organised, non-booking filmgoer) that most of its films will probably get commercial booking later.
One of the festival films. Bolognini's La Notte Brava (translated, aptly enough, into Night Heat) from stories and a script by Pasolini, is already showing in London with an `X' certificate, after being banned in France, of all places. Typically (of Pasolini), the story is violent to the point of self-destruction; the rather hysterical and repeti- tive pattern of action—thefts, fights, lovemaking, money-spending (as frenzied as money-getting), dashes on motor-bikes or in stolen car, threats, cajolings, a hint of homosexuality—seems all to familiar. What Bolognini manages is not a realis- tic view of Roman night-life, but isolated moments of great visual power, a heightened view of his subject. Look at the actors: prosti- tutes and spivs played by people as distinguished" looking as Antonella Lualdi, Anna Maria Fer- rero, Laurent Terzieff or Jean-Claude BrialYt
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