Cinema
Funny and Musical
By ISABEI, QUIGLY Expresso Bongo. (Carlton.) - Third Man on the Mountain.
(Leicester Square Theatre.) 'THE Corporation,' says Gilbert Harding as Himself in Expresso Bongo (director: Val Guest; `A' certificate), 'has the deepest respect respect for teenagers.' In just the same tongue-in-cheek, half-alarmed, read y-to- learn sort of way, haven't we all? And for `pop' and all it comprises, and words like expresso and all they conjure, and the whole sub-adult world that has suddenly burst into violent life like forest undergrowth? Well, 'respect' may be going a bit far: bafflement is more like it, the sort of gingerly mystification and uneasiness aroused by un- exploded mines, unlabelled bottles of pills, bee- hives at the honey-pinching season, bats indoors, or religious maniacs. What is it all about? How much is one to take it to heart? Teenage life as I remember it was a very different kettle of fish, and nothing is more ageing than to look back across a social revolution.
But where the film scores is as part of the more general revolution, as another shiny nail in the coffin of other-people's-idea-of-us; and I like to think of it in the farthest corners of Ecuador or Alaska or the Bronx making people sit up and revise their views. Except, of course, that it is Funny and Musical, two things that will tend to stop people taking it to heart. And heart, inciden- tally, is what it has rather a lot of, perhaps too much for a satire of the kind to support; heart not in the sentimental sense but somehow in the effect it has on us. One cares and is involved just a bit too much. This is the fault—or rather the result of the temperament—of the main actors, rather than of Wolf Mankowitz's script. Laurence Harvey, looking remarkably unlike himself in a hat pulled perpetually over his ears, even at times in bed, plays the spiv theatrical agent at a frenzied pace that keeps one on the hop with sympathetic frenzy —an enormously stimulating experience, but not, perhaps, what was originally intended. Now that he has given up playing nice young men, Mr. Harvey becomes an enormous national asset, if only because he seems to embody, temperamen- tally, so much that needs saying in our films and hasn't been said and now just begins to be said. This performance of his has, in a comedy and a musical, almost disquieting strength and tough- ness. Then Sylvia Syms, to a lesser extent, does the same sort of thing: her Maisie the Stripper gets more—humanly, sympathetically more—than per- haps the part warrants, so that between them one feels 'involved' with their household, caring a bit too much when the suitcases are finally packed. And, curiouser and curiouser, we get to Bongo himself, Cliff Richard as the teenage teenagers' idol, who plays his part so straight that there seems no satire about it at all and one is left with the disturbing feeling that here is Cliff Richard in person, as credulous and as nice as Bongo, as simple and as duped. He is either such a clever actor that he actually persuades one he isn't acting or else a boy of such transparent and alarming simplicity that the whole of Expresso Bongo has rolled off him like water off a duOc's back. Which- ever it is, he makes an attractive, if weird, impres- sion. Somehow he stops one laughing, at times, when one wants to and ought to, just because of his air ,of conviction,and otherworldliness.
And so, for all its amiable sleaziness, the film has its peculiar morality and whacks what wants whacking without making you feel (like so much satire) that there's nothing on earth besides it, no anti-whack. It is fast, efficient, and often very funny, and because of its oddities of casting you can take its funniness in several ways, its jokes depending for what they mean to you on how far or close you are, how involved or uninvolved, how puzzled or merely amused. Many of them are pretty obvious, like mocking television panels and earnest social researchers and film stars' interviews. Others involve just as fair game, like religion in entertainment, and vicious mothers, and seemed to raise a faint whiff of shock around me the time I saw it. The main thing about them is that they are homegrown jokes without being parochial. From the narrowest and most specialised world imaginable, they have managed to say something that, however dimly and indirectly, applies to the rest of us. National portraiture in Soho? National high jinks anywhere, as far as I'm concerned, if they only keep as high as this.
Immune as I am to the charms of Switzerland —which include all the ingredients of Walt Dis- ney's Third Man on the Mountain (director: Ken Annakin; `U' certificate), mountains and moun- taineers, yodelly songs, national costume of a peculiarly bunchy and ridiculous sort and an architecture yOu could apply the same adjectives to—I sat through the film in what felt like ideal objectivity. I note that, in spite of the heart- sinking gothic credits and William Alwyn's music that swirled about like the mist round an early- morning funicular, it turned out to be rather less worse, as you might say, than seemed at first likely. James MacArthur is the young hero, Henty-type, too boyish and bluff to credit, but never mind, the whole film is as well. James Donald, the best unused jeune premier in the British cinema, turns up behind a scowl and a beard as the boy's (initially) wicked uncle—an extraordinary fate for an actor of his quality, to be found third or fourth down the cast list in a, let's face it, pretty B sort of picture. The mountaineering scenes are realistic and made me feel sick, like Cinerama. But, then, I just can't enthuse over the mystique of mountaineering, a masculine bit of mysticism, like Hemingway heroes or the price of scent.
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