How I Envy Him
THE Boulting Brothers' film version of Kingsley Anus's Lucky Jim (producer : Roy; director : John) should make anyone who is sick of a Lucky Jim mystique throw up his hat and cheer. For here it is strip- ped of all that the mystique- mongers have put about and that turned Jim (rather to his own surprise and bewilderment, I should think) into a symbol of our society and the rest of it. The film has taken what was farcical in the book and turned it into a rowdy, slap- happy, knockabout comedy in which all that was social, significant, representative, etc. etc., is kept firmly out and Jim is simply the good-hearted oaf at the bottom of the provincial academic ladder and firmly, very firmly, nothing else.
The result has its virtues and its obvious limita- tions. Its great virtue is negative : it has managed to make a film about academic life that wholly lacks the tiresome forms of academic humour (the undergraduate-jape, the donnish-whimsical, the waggish-low—or, on the other hand, high—brow, and so on); not that one can accuse Mr. Amis of them, but that the thought of a film about univer- sity life raises awful doubts beforehand. The limi- tations are obvious : the film is likeable but not too successful, the knockabout being too broad, the jokes mostly longwinded and the preliminary warnings that a joke is on its way being like the friendly nudges of an inebriated elephant. Ian Carmichael does all he can with Jim, looks right, moves right, wears his horn-rimmed spec- tacles at the right tottering angle on an undig- nified nose; but the script (Patrick Campbell's) makes him too oafish, surely, so that it is hard to believe he would ever get the charming girl Sharon Acker makes of Christine, or arouse even the amused patronage of the Chancellor (Clive Brook, beautifully suggesting the unsnobbish re- moteness of the non-provincial down for a fleeting visit). The best thing about it is Hugh Griffiths's folksy professor of history oozing academic hooey, pompous bonhomie and craw- thumping self-interest. Terry-Thomas as his awful novelist-manqué son looks a bit lost behind a beard. The small parts, as in the previous Boulting comedies, are a delight and steer merci- fully clear of the usual British type-casting.
Oh! For a Manl is broad comedy again : I laughed rather harder at it, but then Jayne Mans- field, through no fault of her own, for she is no comedienne, strikes me as funny. She is so far from what one normally thinks of as a woman that really it is hard to think of her as one. That undulating body looks like foam-rubber, not flesh; that whitish hair like nylon floss. Indeed, in this film her opening conversational gambit is always a squeal that has an absolutely non- human sound to it, like the 'mama' of a rubber doll. This film, which takes off American tele- vision. advertising and publicity methods in general, is taken from the play Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? and the best thing about it is a newcomer called Tony Randall, who makes a chirruping attractive arrival as the advertising man whom fate picks at random for world fame as the film star's Lover-Doll.
Fred Zinnemann's A Hat Jul of Rain, which I mentioned last week is, for all its dreadful sub- ject—drug addiction—and exotic detail, not a spectacular film; nor is it about cases, either, but about people : people you wonder about, don't quite understand, people who are inconsistent and off-centre, as they•so often are in life, but whom you believe in, all the same. Its focus is less on a man's disintegration as a drug addict than on his surroundings and family; on the effect it has on a family group in a poorish tenement when one of its members takes to something secret and terrible at the rate of forty dollars a day, seven days a week. Savings have already been used up, wrecking Pop's lifelong dream of a bar of his own, when the film starts; four jobs have been lost, a baby is on the way, and only the brother's car is left to trade in for further shots in the arm. The treatment is tense and humane, without senti- mentality ever, and without compromise. Don Murray, the young husband of Bachelor Party, the cowboy of Bus Stop, takes another big stride ahead as the man reduced to writhing and scream- ing if the drug isn't there on time, promptly twice a day; Anthony. Franciosa, Eva Marie Saint, Lloyd Nolan, all excellent, intelligent players, give their best. An impressive film and not (though it may sound it) depressing. ISABEL WIGLY
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