REVIEW OF THE ARTS
Christopher Hudson on a floodtide of nostalgia
If the week's new films, all of them from the States, have one thing in common, it is a quiet desperation about the way the world is. The first victim is Harry Stoner in Save the Tiger ('AA' Oscar One and Two). He is managing director of a small textile business in Los Angeles. One morning, waking up in his well-appointed home, in bed next to his less-than-wellappointed wife, he finds the world has grown unfamiliar, bigger than he can handle. There are, he muses, no heroes left, nothing to hold on to, nothing to give life a purpose beyond the everyday struggle for survival within a respectable income-bracket.
When he and the world were young, life could be lived to the patter of Babe Ruth's tiny feet, and the rhythm of 'Time on My Hands,' Teddy Wilson on piano and Lester Young on tenor sax. Now the belt is tight, and Harry Stoner can't summon up a proper expression of horror as he looks back upon his wasted youth. Driving into town, a young drop-out, Myra, thumbs a lift and offers on an impulse to sleep 'with him. He refuses, but gently. At the workshop the new season is ready; there is no money to get it off the ground. With the reluctant cornpliance of his partner and finance director Phil Greene, Stoner decides to hire an arson specialist to burn down one of his factories, and use the insurance as a floater. Problems like this intrude on his memories. He settles an argument between the designer and chief cutter; he finds a prostitute for a favoured customer who suffers a heart attack under her massage; at the fashion show he seems to see the buyers' chairs taken over by dead and wounded comrades from war days. Later he drives Myra to the beach house and they make love. In the morning he offers her money before going. He is a man of business because that is all that is left to him.
Save the Tiger has two claims on our attention. One is Jack, Lemmon as Harry Stoner — that habitually amiable face corseted into lines of paunchy discontent. It is a good performance; it gives the film a measure of realism it would otherwise have missed. The other is that Save the Tiger is representative of what has become the most familiar American export apart from the Western: the middle-aged urban dweller looking back to a time when the world was natural, innocent, full of possibilities — when, in Scott Fitzgerald's words, "it seemed only a question of a few years before the older people would step aside and let the world be run by those who saw things as they were — and it all seems rosy and romantic to us who were young then, because we will never feel quite so intensely about our surroundings any more."
It may be a deep-seated accidie, a sophisticated nostalgie de boue; it may be that American film men reach the decision-taking level around the change of life. Either way it is now well-nigh impossible to negotiate the flood-tide of nostalgic sentiment without snagging on a solecism. Honest Phil Greene talking about his Sunday afternoon fishing expeditions comes over like a latter-day Hiawatha. And the ' symbol ' is also wild, natural, pure: a campaign to save the Tiger (" There are only 556 left in the world ") to which Harry Stoner gives a small donation. Some idiot has him saying (or maybe it's Myra), "Lions and tigers always return to a place of remembered beauty." Sure enough, the film ends on a frozen shot of Harry Stoner, leaning on a perimeter fence, watching a baseball game.
The Effect of Gamma. Rays on..man-In-The-Moon Marigolds
('AA' Bloomsbury) is a hunk of wet porridge, made diges tible by a marvellously salty per formance by Joanne Woodward. She is Beatrice, a middle-aged woman left without alimony when her husband left her and then died. She has two young girls at school, and makes a small liv ing ringing round to get custom tor a dance studio and having lodgers in the spare room. All human life is there, you will exclaim. Too right. The older of the children, Ruth, is epileptic, complicated, outgoing; the younger, Matilda, shy, clever, busy with her pets and her science lessons. Here again the symbol clashes loud above the rest of the orchestra. Matilda wins a prize for her marigold project — flowers subjected to various doses of cobalt-sixty radiation — and we realise with a pleasurable thrill at our intelligence how the normal plants, the slight mutants and the stunted growths can refer to people as well.
The Broadway play, which was a flop over here, has been adapted and improved for the screen. Insofar as this focuses our attention, often in close-up, on Joanne Woodward, this is all to the good. Beatrice is a woman much sinned against, so she feels. She has a zany, unpurposed energy which strikes out at all around it to keep from turning in on itself. She is untidy, keeps a sluttish house, is hard and domineering to the children whom she loves with a possessive fury. When one of them turns against her she is heartbroken, but has no reserves of routine affection to fall back on. The bitter jokes are no longer funny; they are pitiful. At the end, drunk, awry, she makes a pathetic attempt at reconciliation. But the children have defensively established their own worlds — into which she can no longer enter.
It is a difficult subject to circumscribe without failing for the sentimental cliché that ties the whole thing together and avoids the hideous durability of these family relationships, the way that in real life the suffering continues long after the curtain has fallen and the last reel is in the can. Not all the schmaltzy moments have been elided; but Joanne Woodward's honest, perfectly observed performance, sensibly directed by her husband Paul Newman, makes it possible to come away with a real sense of the desperation of a woman scorned, helpless, aware of her intemperance and unable to control it, who sees herself destroying where she would wish to create. She, too, through Ruth and Matilda sees a world that is natural, innocent, full of possibilities; but, like Harry Stoner, she cannot return to it, she can only destroy it for her children by showing how its experience is a brief one and its passing leaves only regrets.
The third film, Soyient Green ('AA ' Empire) is a parable, set in
the future, of what Harry Stoner and Beatrice are up against today. The year is 2022; the place is New York, made unrecognisable by over-population.
science ficti6n, as I've said in the past, can be peculiarly impressive in its force when transferred to the screen by a good director with an eye for incidental detail. ioyient Green is continuously gripping, its arguments apocalyptic but never unbelievable. Small wonder that nostalgia for innocence, wild nature, wide open spaces, has become such a staple of American feature films, if these are the fears that lie beneath.
Previous page
