Railroads to Freedom
By ISABEL QUIGLY The Train. (Odeon, Leices- ter Square, 'U' certifi- cate.) — Psyche 59. (Columbia, 'X' certifi- cate.) — London Film Festival. (Odeon, Hay- market.) Admittedly I'm a sucker for lots of its in- gredients: Resistance adventure (true, at that), technical train stuff ' and particularly the details of derailment, ingenious hoodwinks, steam engines of an almost extinct, anachronistic grandeur, and Burt Lancaster, with grandeur to match. But personal prejudice apart (not that it's ever possible for us to be effectively parted), it seems to me a highly seeable film, in the sense that you talk of a highly readable book; an epithet that contains its own limitations, of course, since it would hardly occur to one to call Satyajit Ray or Buiiuel seeable, any more than to label, say, Patrick White or Proust readable. A middlingly intentioned film in fact with rather better than middling results, and one that actually deserves its 'U' certificate without being childish Over the panicky cruelty of the Germans' last days in France, and based on the moral question: if it's a choice between St. Paul's Cathedral and a single human life, which?
For St. Paul's read Jeu de Paume and you have the situation as the Allies were approaching Paris. The film opens with admirable irony, before the credits: the Jeu de Paume's curator (from whose book this story comes) is talking feelingly to the German colonel under whom she has worked for four years. He is not like the others, he appre- ciates paintings officially considered decadent, he has done his best to protect them, he is in fact a man after her own heart. Yes, says the colonel, Who besides being an appreciator is Paul Scofield, and proceeds to have them crated for removal to Germany. The rest of the film is about the Resistance's efforts to stop them getting there, and the large number of lives lost in the process. At the end the question of right and responsibility is asked explicitly when a pile of about twenty hostages, shot dead, is shown beside the abandoned crates of pictures.
My feeling, though 1 may be wrong, is that Frankenheimer is angrier about the corpses (and there were plenty of others en route) than he is pleased over the happy ending of his freight. But between the ironic beginning and angry end there's action at just the right pace—suspense, climax, anti-climax, all nicely balanced but not so neatly manipulated as to make it seem a good yarn, rather than a fact. In those last days before the liberation of Paris, when it must have seemed more than ever a sickening waste to be killed, the Allies were, it seems, daily expected and daily didn't turn up; and the outburst that greets the news that French troops are to enter Paris first, 'as a gesture,' could, I suppose, be labelled anti- Gaullist : glory and gestures not being part of this kind of fighting. Besides Lancaster and Scofield, there's Michael Simon and Jeanne Moreau, splendidly local..
A bad enough film is never• dull: if it's really terrible it becomes a collector's piece, revived for the sophisticated titillation of film-lovers. Between Alexander Singer's Psyche 59 and the unfor- gettable Youngblood Hawke (to which I keep lovingly returning), it's a very close shave when it comes to judging exquisite absurdity. And if is the wilder nonsense, Psyche 59 has a subtler appeal—instead of yowling With laughter you can play spot the significant and smile. Because everything in it's so weighed down with the direc- tor's intentions, and such glorious nonsense, poor man, results, that even the generally magnificent Patricia Neal (playing a 'psychologically' blind woman whose husband is unfaithful) can't do much about it. Curt Jurgens (oddly moustached) is the husband, Samantha Eggar the wicked irresistible, Beatrix Lehmann an astrologically mad grandmother, and Ian Bannen a love-lorn youth who seems to have strayed in from some other film. Warmly recommended for all the wrong reasons.
The Eighth London Film Festival is under way and its organisers want to emphasise (particularly this year, when its shows at the Odeon, Hay- market, make it more generally accessible than in other years at the National Film Theatre) that it's open not just to members or initiates but to the general public. So far we've had: Kon Ichikawa's Alone on the Pacific, perhaps the most straight- forwardly successful yet, a lightweight charmer from a man one tended to consider a heavy- weight gloom. Based on the adventures of a youth from Osaka who two years ago crossed the
nearly 6,000 miles (7,000 with wriggles and mistakes, he calculated) alone in a small boat from there to California, it swings with perfect ease between the lyrical, the heroic and the domestic-realist. The sea scenes are beautiful and taste of salt, but the most unforgettable thing is the tragi-comic young hero, a highly strung, anti- social, resourceful fellow who seems to arrive at his goal more through luck than skill and whose adventures in the minute space the story allows him somehow manage to keep fresh and lively, as if the circumstances were inventing their own jokes, not taking them over from anyone else.
Another Japanese film is Susumu Hani's He and She, the story of a young woman's efforts to stay human though bourgeois. 1 don't know why it should be so depressing to see the social uniformity brought by affluence; but the couple's flat, all electric gadgets and telly and interchange- able with any similar couple's flat in Surbiton, makes a sad background; and against its familiarity it is all the harder to judge the heroine as a person, not just a social being, because one doesn't know enough to see whether her charac- teristics are individual or merely social: her giggles, her ingenuousness, her little-girl airs, are these signs of immaturity or just Japanese usage? The husband wants a quiet life and (one suspects) children; the wife shrinks from children of her own but tries to enlarge her life and sympathies by befriending an ex-fellow-student of her hus- band's, now a ragged pedlar. It doesn't really work and the film ends in inconclusive melancholy, with the wife back among the gadgets and humdrum relationships behind the (literal and social) fence.
From the Argentine comes La Herencia (The Inheritance), directed by Ricardo Alventosa, from the Maupassant story about the inheritance that depends on the young couple having a child, and the husband's inability to give his wife one; with the office friend brought in to help out, and consequent wealth and contentment all round. The story transfers perfectly well to the present, as it contains nothing particularly suited to Maupassant's age (though perhaps the audacity of the concept of a planned, connived and neces- sary adultery must have been more startling then: nowadays, after all, there could always be AID in such circumstances); and Argentinian petit bourgeois domesticity is shown with a lively sense of ironic horror.
PS. To anyone who may have wondered, last week, what long cardigans, and long black hair and stockings were doing in nineteenth-century Russia, may I say that Anna Karina, on her way through the press, was transmogrified to Anna Karenina.
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