Christopher Hudson on the gentle ironies of Satyajit Ray
In its deepest crisis, the British film industry continues to give the impression of a deserted factory in which the unattended machinery goes on grinding out unsupervised and worthless goods. Its two latest shoddy toys, Big Zapper and From Beyond the Grave, were the hrst films press-shown last week. Following them came another American cops-and-gangsters import which I was about to praise moderately, if only to turn a weary comparison with the other' police thrillers we've been seeing so much of recently. And then along came Company Limited ("U" Academy Two) by Satyajit Ray whose Distant Thunder met with such acclaim at the last London Film Festival. If only in its refusal to exaggerate, to punch, bite, kick, scream or yell abuse at the least provocation, Company Limited put the others in perspective.
The film is as rich in small, telling details as all of Ray's work. Shyamal Chatterjee is an ambitious young executive, recently appointed export sales manager with a British-owned fan and lamp manufacturer in Calcutta. Eager, industrious, smartly-dressed, with an attractive wife and a luxurious ninth-floor flat, he seems to have left his humble origins behind him.
Then his wife's young sister Tutul arrives from the country, and under her amused, inquiring gaze he finds the need to justify himself.
Chatterjee's is such an attractive personality that Ray's gentle satire upon his behavious and as pirations is that much more devastating. Tutul is taken to the races, to a nightclub (Chatterjee teasing her that she never expected Calcutta to be such an ex citing place), and to her sister's beauty salon. She is apprised of Chatterjee's young son at a British-style public school, and is taken through the povertystricken streets to a select Calcutta club from which, so Chatterjee tells her as they sit by the swimming pool sipping their long cool drinks, Indians would have been excluded ten years ago. "Privilege isn't what it was," he says delightfully.
In the flat itself, with its prominent display of glossy magazines and a native temple sculpture next to a Degas print of a ballet dancer, we see Tutul faintly disquieted by the free-andeasy manners of Chatterjee's business acquaintances, at a cocktail party. Chatterjee explains the need to make a good impression, especially now that he is in line for a directorship, and Tutul is satisfied. But the iron has entered into his soul. When a consignment of fans is found to be faulty just before the delivery date and Chatterjee's reputation and future are at stake, he. avoids the contractual penalties by rigging a labour dispute at his factory. He gets his directorship, but Tutul's silent reproach makes it plain that all his efforts to impress upon her that success hasn't changed him, have failed.
Constructed around an ethical Issue which would be indistinct to the protagonists of the average British or American film, Company Limited nevertheless leaves a very powerful impression. Beautifully acted, in particular by Barun Chanda as Shyamal Chatterjee, it never strikes a false note. Satyajit Ray, who also wrote the screenplay and the music, has it under control from Tutul's first, gently ironic, remark that Chatterjee's annual salary as a director, 120,000 rupees, would be what Tagore was awarded for his Nobel prize, to the quietly amused, unmalicious sequence near the end when Chatterjee returns exultantly with the news of his directorship only to find the lift out of order. At first he bounds up the steps two at a time, but you have to work to get to the top, and he drags his feet up the last flights, arriving at his flat dishevelled, out of breath, and/ just a little ridiculous.
With The Stone Killer ("X" Odeon, Leicester Square) Michael Winner continues to elbow his way into the front ranks of Hollywood's reliably conventional directors. Here is yet another brutal, 'dedicated' American cop, beating up suspects, gunning down adversaries and defying his own police department in a oneman vendetta against organised crime. Taken from John Gardner's novel A Complete State of Death and transplanted to Los Angeles, it stars Charles Bronson, with a face like a karate chop, as the man who mops up a murder mob after a Mafia massacre.
Apparently it went down well in the States, perhaps on the aesthetic grounds adduced by the New York Times critic in a passage I can't resist quoting: "The Stone Killer keeps turning into exciting cinema, crude, often funny and sometimes quite brilliantly idiomatic. It may come as close to inspired primitivism as we are likely to get in the movies these days." And so say all of us.
Of the two British films, Big Zapper ("X" Classic, Piccadilly) is, I suppose, lively, although it is also revoltingly sadistic, even for what sets out to be a comedy. In most respects it is a British version of Super Dick, although this time the private eye is female and she keeps only one regular stud. It has a ludicrous script and no acting to speak of, although Linda Marlowe as Zapper (currently disposing of nine more bodies every night in a play at the Hampstead Theatre Club) gives a passable imitation of Diana Rigg. A sequel has already been filmed.
From Beyond the Grave ("X" Warner West End) is even worse. Four seedy horror stories have as their departure point an antique shop whose objets d'art have an odd way of turning against their purchasers. Kevin Connor, the director, smartly sets about wasting the talents of David Warner, Peter Cushing, Nyree Dawn Porter, Ian Carmichael and others, and only the second episode gets off the ground at all — entirely because Ian Bannen, and Donald and Angela Pleasance as the father/daughter team who bewitch him, struggle through to give moments of credibility to the appalling script. If we can repress a shudder at the slatternliness of the whole enterprise, there is nothing to raise a moment of fright or a flicker of interest.
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