Cinema
Poor Pamela
Christopher Hudso
The certificates handed out by the censor have of late been so erratic and unpredictable that one must assume he has been acceding rather tamely to distributors' requests. Two new films bear out this assumption. Mistress Pamela (Empire Two) is a silly romp based loosely on Richardson's novel, Pamela. The strength of Richardson is in his intense preoccupation with his characters which helps to redeem the prurience of the story, in which a young wench struggles to defend her virtue against the lecherous lord of the manor so that by the time he tricks her into submission he loves her deeply enough to make her an honest woman.
In,the film, written, produced and directed by Jim O'Connolly who would do better writing bubblecaptions for Valentine, a freshfaced young blade chases a rather plain girl around. a stately home, with many a coy joke and eighteenth-century oath. Badly acted, and a great deal less salacious than the Carry On films, it contains nothing remotely harmful to children except a couple of bare breasts. It has been given an ' X ' certificate. The other film is Fury (Odeon Haymarket) which the censor has given an 'AA' certificate despite very explicit scenes or rape, lunacy, massacre and the brutal flogging of men and women.
Admittedly the tragic portentousness of the story, based on
Lermontov's Vadim, is belied at every step by a script of utter banality which we must attribute in part to Edward Bond since hr. didn't take his name off the credits.
It is merely personal preference to say that I'd like to have seen Tout Va Bien (' X ' Paris-Pullman late) given a general certificate so that children could have been exposed at an impressionable age to a prime example of the turgidity of intellectualised revolutionary politics, and not have to endure a slower, more painful disillusion later. Co-directed by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean Pierre Gorin, Tout Va Bien has been widely publicised as Godard's first ' traditional ' film since 1988, or to use their terminology, the first to confront "the basic political/ aesthetic problem" of making a film that would be more widely seen. The most impressive thing about it is the insolence with which Godard patronises his new audience, first telling us that he's signed up celebrities so that we won't be bored (Yves Montand and Jane Fonda), and then throwing in scraps of a love story, like bones to pariah dogs, in which he simply repeats a few lines of dialogue from Le Mepris before making his couple get down to the serious business of ideological discussion.
They are given plenty of opportunity. He is a film-maker and she is Paris correspondent for an American radio network; they go to interview the manager of a meat factory and are locked in with him by the striking workers as emblems, albeit reluctant, of bourgeois society. Most of the film is taken up with long monologues to camera, first by the manager, workers and union negotiator at the factory, and then, after their' release, by Fonda and Montand, spelling out their crises of conscience over communism and the 'validity of aesthetics. We leave this curious love story with the two of them rethinking each other in historical terms. If they decide to make a go of it, I sure pity the children.
New films by Robert Altman and Peter Yates would normally deserve pride of place, but I found both of them a bit disappointing. Altman has wanted for years to make a film of Raymond Chandler's novel The Long Goodbye (' X ' London Pavilion), and came back to it after he finished Images. It must have seeemed a good idea to update it to present-day California with Elliott Gould turning Philip Marlowe into a downbeat, shambling slob, and the film is attractively, intelligently made. But the Chandler style is inalienable; and the result is a curious hybrid which never knows quite
where it's going. The characters — an alcoholic writer with a beau tiful wife in the Malibu Beach colony, an amiable and vicious racketeer, Marlowe himself — seem to move in a vacuum, with no strings attaching them to the outside world.
With The Friends of Eddie Coyle (' X ' ABC2) it's just the other way round: the criminal milieu is taken Spectator November 10, 1973
so much for granted that it's hard to know* exactly what's happening, especially since much of the dialogue is laconic, sometimes inaudible argot. I advise anyone who's interested to start reading the novel by George Higgins on which the film is based.
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