Cinema
Addicts' Week
By ISABEL QUIGLY Who Was That Lady? (Leices- ter Square Theatre.)--Hell a City. (Warner.)—All ille Fine Young Cannibals.
Odeon, Marble Arch.)
ANOTILER lean week at the cinema. Time to catch up on Eisenstein at the Everyman (I van Part I for a fortnight, Part II for another fortnight from the 16th) or Fred Astaire's auto- biography at home. Time to wonder whether Dean Martin and Tony Curtis are really all that funny or just funny in comparison with nothing else. The sort of week for the film addict, the man who'll see anything, find interest in anY• thing; or for the sub-critical, the man who'll sit through anything at all without reallY knowing why. In my early film-going days I made lists of films I had seen and starred them like hotels. Pretty well everything got four stars or three at least; 'B' pictures, newsreels, serials, travelogues, advertisements for second- hand prams or day-old chicks—they all seemed to me pretty nearly marvellous. I'm not sure if this put me among the addicts or the sub' critics.
Anyway, here (for either, but hardly for the middlingly critical unaddicted) we have Dean Martin and Tony Curtis in Who Was That Lady? (director George Sidney; If certificate) in a comedy about a man who pretends to his wife he's an FBI agent and the girl she caught hint kissing was a Communist spy. Not bad: presently she's (though fanatically jealous) pushing him out of the house to spend evenings with other blonde Communists. It's a lesson in the technique of lying.
The script starts well and the pair of them time everything just right : even their relationship, why they are friends. On their track comes James Whitmore, who looks like Spencer Tracy and has stomach ulcers: a lumbering, likeable representa- tive of order in the middle of anarchy. Gradually the jokes pile up—too many of them—into a toppling heap, and when the two heroes end up in the basement of the Empire State Building. sabotaging the central heating under the impres- sion that they are sinking a Russian submarine, it seems not so much the climax as the last stravv. All the same, it's a likeable piece, and that's more than you can say for the rest of the week's films, Hell is a City (director: Val Guest; 'A' certifi- cate), a British thriller set in Manchester, with Stanley Baker as the policeman and all sorts of other clichés, a fine betting scene on the open moors outside a mining village and some vicious kicking in the final rooftop fight; and All the Fine Young Cannibals (director: Michael Ander- son; 'A' certificate), one of those lush tales of Texan juvenile depravity, high-coloured, low- spirited, with Natalie Wood, Robert Wagner and Susan Kohner (all painfully type-cast and looking as if they think so, too) as the anthropophagous youngsters, and Pearl Bailey as the only agreeable thing around.
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