6 NOVEMBER 1976, Page 44

Cinema

Naked arrows

Clancy Sigal

Naked male bodies of bored Roman soldiers make love to each other in Sebastiane (Gate, X certificate.) Writer-producer-director Derek Jarman's boast that it 'is perhaps the first film that depicts homosexuality in a completely matter-of-fact way' is surprisingly justified. Maybe not 'first'—what about A Bigger Splash or even Sunday Bloody Sunday?—but it's a film that deserves our attention on that score. Sebastiane falls down only where de Mille and so many film-makers more experienced than Jarman have failed, in trying to portray a saint believably. Though Jarman and his co-director Paul Humfress offer a fairly plausible interpretation of the martrydoma freaked-out confusion of Apollonian sun worship, sex repression and pure narcissism came away thinking, what a pain in the neck (no pun intended) Sebastian must have been to his lonely, sun-maddened buddies.

The semi-improvised script pursues the general outlines of the myth. Sebastian, the christianised captain of Diocletian's palace guard in 304 AD, is banished to a lonely desert outpost after the Emperor turns against the followers of Jesus. (Leonard Treviglio, who has the title role, is too weedy and spiritual-looking for a gladiator, but let that pass.) Because he has gone pacifist, his commander Severus (Barney James)—who has fallen in love with the future saint— whips and punishes the uncomplaining, indeed neurotically grateful, Sebastian. Eventually, his comrades get as fed up with Sebastian's po-faced piety as I soon was, and they happily strap him to a post and zing those arrows into him—in the same kind of slow, tender motion that is used to show the centurions sodomising each other.

If the makers' intention was to say that St Sebastian was nothing more than a sadomasochism nut with a mindless streak of love-of-suffering, they succeeded admirably. But I wish they'd worked a little harder to make him as human and vivid as some of the other Roman soldiers, notably Neil Kennedy as Maximus, the boorish practical joker with the leather nose. Kennedy's vulgar, 'scratchy and wholly believable portrayal was, for me, the film's highlight. This indeed is how some of my barrack mates in the Fourth Infantry Division behaved after they'd seen too much combat, been away from women too long. And the gratifying thing is that Kennedy's performance grows naturally out of the assembled actors' feeling for men at enforced rest under a hot, enervating sun. They are betrayed only by the director's insistence on long, dawdling takes of Roman soldiers frolicking and soulfully kissing each other in the lagoon, which are as lugubrious as their heterosexual counter

parts usually are. However, the emotional authenticity of most of the scenes of insensi' tive rough-house and sarcastic phallic bYplay among the centurions saves Sebastiane from being merely a curiosity. Semi-naked male bodies hang agonisinglY by their chest muscles yet again in The Return of a Man Called Horse (Odeon Leicester Square, AA certificate.) It's prettY awful—and unconsciously racist as well. As, a sort of St Tarzan of the Dakotas, Richare Harris—who also co-produced—could take lessons in dramatic tact from Sebastian".

As he did in the original, Harris Plays Lord John Morgan, a nineteenth-centurY English aristocrat adopted into the Yelloo' Hand tribe. After five bored years back ill blighty, he returns to the west only to find, that his blood brothers have been decimate° and enslaved by evil white trappers. Natur• ally outraged, he rounds up the Yellow Hand remnants, including women, any teaches them how to outfight the whites an(' regain their lands. The interminable pectoral' hanging sequence occurs when Harris, t° prove that he is wiser than the Indian medicine man who preaches passive despair' submits to a trial-by-suffering that makes St Sebastian seem like a mere dilettante.

The film's ostensible point is Lord John's redemption of the heathen through his own suffering. However, the real point is how herd-like and stupid Indians are. As scripted' they are incapable of relationships with each other, only with the great white father frorn England. And director Irving Kershner lines them up in front of his camera with such patronising, lifeless 'dignity' that one must suppose they're subnormal in some way. 50 it's no surprise when Harris, a white man in a spotlessly clean lace shirt, tutors them ill martial arts which, historically, their ances' tors probably had mastered when Sir John's forbears were still painting blue woads their naked bodies.

Black bodies swing—at baseballs—in the summer breeze in The Bingo Long Travelling All-Stars and Motor Kings (Plaza 1, A certificate.) Curiously, Motown Records, the black producers of this almost-enjoyable romp about America's national sport, steer it perilously close to the racial stereotypes which litter A Man Called Horse. It's about the adventures of a black baseball team ill the late 1930s, when no known black Wa5 allowed to play in the all-white major leagues. I say known black, because—and Bingo is sharply funny about this—a few American blacks crashed the race barrier bY pretending to be Sioux Indians or Cubans. Oddly, for a black-produced film, it fails to, capture the real tang, wit and tragedy tll these pioneer black players who habituallY had to disguise their superior athletic skills by dissembling clownishness in order t° avoid being lynched by bigoted white spec" tators. Instead, Bingo opts to show the players as what they had to pretend to be: big, jolly 'coon show' bucks without a thought in their frizzy heads, but in between high jinks the film makes some telling points about black exploitation of blacks.