5 MARCH 1965, Page 18

Cinema

O'Casey Diluted Young Cassidy. (Empire, 'A' certificate.)—Kiss Me, Stupid. (Leicester Square Theatre, 'X' certificate.)—Good Neighbour Sam. (Colum- bia, 'A' certificate.) TBE omissions in Young Cassidy would fill as many volumes as does the autobiography of Sean O'Casey on which it is based. Muddled, half-committed, unexplanatory, non political (yet oddly attractive), it is supposed to tell us what one of the most committed, politically-minded and volubly explanatory writers of our time was like in his early years; and the result is rather as if Disney had decided to make a film about Lenin guaranteed to tread on no right-wing toe.

You might think it impossible to make a film about the activities of a fiery nationalist during a revolution without explaining any of the issues behind the risings; or, on the other hand, a film about a writer whose plays when first performed caused uproar in the theatre without ever tell- ing you why they did, or what they were all about. But John Ford, who started directing it, and Jack Cardiff, who took over from him, and the late John Whiting, who wrote the literate but evasive screenplay, have managed to set O'Casey in an inoffensive world of charming Georgian slums and tidy poverty and genius at

work by oil-lamp that has little to do with the bitter, rambling, wordy, uproarious reminis- cences that inspired it.

All the same, it has something about it that makes you wish it a great deal better : a scene or two, a few performances, odd lines, and, in spite of its hodgepodge air of inconsistency and inadequacy, a kind of personality that's rather likeable and robust. The strapping Rod Taylor is an odd choice to play O'Casey, and the genius label hung round his neck fits him as uncom- fortably as the collars into which he is thrust towards the end of the film by success; but what he lacks in fire and waspishness he makes up in intelligence and a kind of sober intensity. Edith Evans makes much of Lady Gregory (and avoids the awful lisp O'Casey gives her), and I even liked Redgrave as Yeats, a portrait that in- cludes, not too preposterously, all O'Casey's sly digs or what inspired them. Besides, the two girls, Julie Christie in a small part and Maggie Smith in a large one, both have the individuality and quality and looks and everything else that people used to complain you just couldn't find in a British film. So, there are some good things; and as people count immensely in films, perhaps one overestimates them. And one or two things as well: best of them a riot, early in the film, where a hostile crowd attacks some blacklegs and is in turn attacked by the police and you see that violence of that kind doesn't make for noble wounds, but for barrels crashing on old women and the panic cruelty of escaping boots. If only Ford, Cardiff, Whiting or someone had pushed the facts a bit harder, gathered together the scraps of talent and pinches of excellence, and actually said something about writing, frustration, revolution, the conditions that nourished O'Casey or O'Casey the man himself, instead of pussy- footing politely round the lot.

Comedy depends so much on casting that per- haps inevitably one prefers a joke with Jack Lemmon to one without. The opposite of a comic virtuoso like Sellers, who can put on a personality like a wig and dim or accentuate his own likeableness or dislikeableness at will, Lemmon is always (apparently) himself, the bland, middling, amiable victim of circum- stances, lost socks and marital mishaps. In the past his litmus presence has had an enlivening effect on the sometimes sluggish blueness of Billy Wilder, and perhaps it is the lack of it (so satisfyingly deployed in Good Neighbour Sam just around the corner) that makes Wilder's Kiss Me, Stupid seem so dull.

The two films are almost sinisterly alike in plot, both being concerned with spouses (one male, one female) borrowed for material gain and both developing into cases of outsize mis- taken identity. In Wilder's film there is the usual topographical business with doors, windows, con- fusion of bodies in the shower and wives in the bed. In David Swift's Good Neighbour Sam n the confusion is out of doors, involving car chases, huge hoardings that need repainting over- night, and Edward G. Robinson as a ferocious puritan tycoon who ,demands only clean-living young Americans working on his advertising account and gets Lemmon just when his wife's best friend, needing a stable home life in order to inherit $15,000,000, has borrowed him from the house next door. With foreseeable 'complica- tions. Wilder's is the more complex and am- bitious of the two, since the heart (and therefore some delicacy, which it noticeably doesn't get) comes into it; it has Ray Walston and a heftily miscast Kim Novak with a cold in the head.

ISABEL QUIGLY