CINEMA

Wild colonial,

TREVOR GROVE

In what looks curiously like a devilish ploy thought up by those sirening immigration men at Australia House, we appear to have come under concerted pressure to declare this an unofficial Homage to Ned Kelly Month. Ned Kelly, as is well known, was the last of the Australian bushrangers: the An- tipodes' answer to Robin Hood and no less stout a fellow, to be sure, if Tony

Richardson's film (Ned Kelly, London Pavilion, 'A'), Charles Osborne's book (Ned Kelly, Anthony Blond 35s) and Frank Hatherley's collection of facsimile docu- ments (Ned Kelly, Jackdaw No. 109, 12s)

are all to be believed. They differ in some minor and even in some major (e.g. the date of Kelly's birth) points of detail, but taken as a hagiographic whole they offer an un- precedented opportunity to reassess the odd myth that grew up around this small-time horse rustler and fumbling visionary almost from the first moments of 'the outbreak' nearly a hundred years ago.

Mr Hatherley, very sensibly, asks browsers through his Jackdaw to conclude by doing a little thinking for themselves. 'Ned Kelly,' he points out, 'was a confessed horse-thief, bank robber and murderer. Why do you think he has come to be regarded by many Australians as a folk hero?' Why indeed. Mr Charles Osborne, in his plodding but authentic-seeming tale, comes near to finding an answer; Mr Tony Richardson would appear not even to have attempted one. Instead he has chosen to sidestep the whole question by simply substituting for the hero-figure under discussion a ready made hero-figure of his (and our) own in the person of Mick Jagger. A hint perhaps that Mr Richardson sees folk heroes as being im- mutably of their own time?—born to fulfil a role which in any other circumstances wouldn't even exist?

I regret to report that, if this was indeed how Mr Richardson saw his film—as an essay in the myth-making powers of rebellion—it has misfired wildly. Mick Jag- ger, close-cropped and strangely bearded, peering uncertainly from beneath the brim of a large flown hat and much given to breathy outbursts of stage broguerv. survives transportation to Victoria in the 1870s about as well as Ned Kelly himself might be ex- pected to endure sudden transmigration to a Rolling Stones concert in the middle of Hyde Park. It wouldn't do to suggest that this is all, or even largely, Mr Jagger's fault. Although his acting might best be described as willing. and though even his singing (of a wailing ballad called, I think. 'Come, All You Wild Colonial Boys') is more than a trifle shaky, he displays a winning charm and imperturbable innocence in his handling of the part which almost make up for his somewhat dismal showing as the supposed magnetic leader of men and would-be republican.

But the fault, it must be said, lies not in the star but in the whole concept of -the film—in particular with a script that seldom rises above the level of a fair to mid- dling kangaroo hop and all too often falls into the kind of abominable Irishry which might well have stuck in the throats even of better actors than Mr Jagger. This is particularly irritating when one remem- bers (or as in my case, learns—from Mr Osborne's book) that at least one of Ned Kelly's Irish forefathers must have come to within kissing distance of the Blarney Stone before his expulsion to Van Dieman's Land : his letters, and those of his spoken words that were recorded, make it clear that our Ned could turn a phrase with the best of them, and that this was very much at the root of the sympathy which he aroused among his followers then and amongst his apologists since.

True, some of Kelly's ohiter dicta, in- variably the more banal of them, are faithfully incorporated; and there are other touches of gratifying authenticity: an exact replica of the Kellys' homestead for instance, meticulous reconstructions of the killings at Springybark Creek and of the final show- down at Glenrowan. But too often, some- times as a result of wilful distortion of the facts for the sake of convenience, more fre- quently because of its extraordinarily abrupt and muddled editing, the film loses both the real story and its own version of it between one episode and the next, and only re- orientates itself by reference to the ballad sequence onto which Mr Richardson has weakly chosen to shift the main burden of the tale.

It only remains to say that despite these cavils (and were Mr Richardson a director of whom one expected less, there would be less of them), Ned Kelly is an entertaining enough film and visually at any rate—with photography by Gerry Fisher—a rare pleasure. One shot in particular stays in the mind—of a magnificent white Shorthorn bull straying, pink-eyed with alarm, through what seems like a petrified forest of leafless, ivory-coloured trees . . . But as to providing an answer to Mr Hatherley's question, Mr Richardson's contribution must be judged entirely negative: both Bonnie and Clyde and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid have recently shown us how petty criminals of the Kelly ilk (his much-sung exploits, after all, amounted to no more than the rustling of some 200 horses, a pair of gaily conceived bank raids, three murders and a plan to massacre some policemen that didn't come off: not much in the annals of in- ternational outlawry!) can be raised to heroic proportions on the screen; Tony Richardson's achievement has been the op- posite in that he has succeeded in reducing an already established hero to the status of a mere small-time thief and village-square revolutionary. Such he may well have been, but his compatriots—though perhaps short of other candidates for the job—at least had the wit to give star material its proper due.

Someone else who knows how to put a star to good use is John Huston, though he. like Tony Richardson, comes something of a cropper with The Kremlin Letter (Carlton, 'X')—not so much on grounds of its concept, or execution, which are respec- tively perfectly unobjectionable and, at least technically, flawless, but simply on account of its impenetrable obscurity. A synopsis, of course, throws light into a lot of the darker corners, but without one, I imagine, audi- ences will find themselves seriously confused; which, this being a spy thriller whose chief allure is that no one is quite certain (and with good reason) whose side eN eryone else is on, may well have been part of Mr Huston's intention.

But though duplicity in all its guises— double-crosses. double agents, double- entendres and double takes—flourishes per- niciously, the mood is less that of Le Carre. redolent of crumpled grey suits and bundles of used dollar bills, than that of Hitchcock's Topaz (even down to a personal appearance by director Huston himself in a small pal.). with perhaps more than a touch of the James Bonds thrown in here and there for good measure. Micheal MacLiammOir plays an agent called Sweet Alice. Lila Kedrova looks startled as a fast-fading Moscow madam: a lesbian negress, a drug peddling Chinaman. a virgin (not for long) who can tease safe knobs of their secrets with her toes and a man called the Highwayman— complete with dog-collar and terminal can- cer—go some way towards completing a zany but, it goes without saying, ruthlessly cut-throat cast. The hero sports a suicidal fingernail while a dangerous old queen called Warlock knits bedrocks for the Muscovite haute monde. You have been warned.

Current printing difficulties prevent my making as much of a fuss of Christopher Miles's The Virgin and the Gypsy (Odeon. Haymarket, 'AA') as I should like and as it richly deserves—though happily they do allow me the indulgence of dismissing Wood- stock (Empire, 'X'), in a few choice words,

as tedious, inept and a must for none but the most hopeless addicts. Mr Miles's ad- aptation of the Lawrence story is, on the contrary, anything but tedious or inept: delicately conceived, ravishingly photo-

graphed and designed it is a film which while making no attempt to rival the splend- ours of Ken Russell's Women in Love. shows

up a good deal of that film's. lush vacuity for what it was. This is Lawrence at his agreeable, least hectoring best, ably served by an impeccable cast and in particular a heroine (Joanna Shimkus) to whose trembl- ing firmness and stubbornness of heart he might well have lost his own.