Cinema
Loaded dice
Christopher Hudson
In Billy Jack ('AA' Classics Piccadilly and Chelsea) the dice are loaded so heavily they don't bounce. A National Student Film Corporation Production,' it is chiefly remarkable for presenting in the person of Billy Jack a grown-up Fauntleroy or Lancelot of our times. Tanned, clean-jawed, steely-eyed, loose-limbed and part Indian, he can ride like a cowboy, shoot like a villain, dispatch ten men in a row with karate chops, and still retain a sentimental attachment to tender, pliable things, green things, earth things — children, horses, the miracles of nature, Indian customs, a good. woman. He drinks not, neither does he smoke. Under his protection flourishes a 'freedom school' for children of all races, who act, dance and sing as if it came naturally to them. He is also, I almost forgot to add, a Reluctant War Hero — the idea being that you need to shed blood before you deserve to be able to save it.
On the other side, there is a mean bastard of a deputy sheriff whose daughter runs away from the brutality to the 'freedom school '; and also the richest, most powerful man in town, who is so unbelievably scoundrelly that he goes and shoots up wild mustangs for the fun of it. And he has a son who terrorises the kids and rapes the middle-aged schoolmistress. No wonder Billy Jack is driven to violence, no wonder the kids adore him for it, no wonder the law takes its course, no wonder love blossoms out of hatred, no wonder we all walked out hours ago.
The Burglars ('AA' Astoria and Met
ropole) has everything money can buy except talent. For the producer and director, Henri Verneuil, the recipe for boxoffice success was simple: "I set Omar Sharif to capture Jean-Paul Belmondo — if he can." He also threw in Dyan Cannon for good measurement. Then, it would seem, he sat back and let the film unwind.
A straightforward cops-and-robbers film is difficult to spoil, but Verneuil does his best. Belmondo and cheerfully villainous friends steal a case of emeralds. They get chased by Sharif, a cop who manages to put the ,entire Athens police force through complicated manoeuvres without telling any of them what is going on. There are a night-club sequence and a car-chase sequence, incorporated into the film with the flimsiest of cynical pretences that they have anything to do with the plot. In fact the behaviour of both sides makes no sense at all, except to get the most screentime out of the three leads. I count myself an admirer of gangster films, but The Burglars is patronising in its assumption that if you can afford the parts you don't have to bother to fit them together.
The Harder They Come, the Jamaican film reviewed favourably in this column by Mark Le Fanu, has now reached the West End and is to be seen at the Cameo Poly.
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