Not Quite Guilty
L'Assassino. (Paris-Pull- man; 'X' certificate.)— The Train Robbers. (Continentale; 'A' cer- tificate.) WITH its darkness and concentration, its close-up view of the significant de- tail, its repetitions and emphases and atmospheric persuasiveness, in fact its whole way of hammering on the nerves, the cinema is just the place for obsessions, guilt, claustrophobia. A familiar device for making the tension mount is to put a suspect in a room alone, and then watch him (as the police do) through a spy-hole: and.who in such a situation can help looking as if he's just strangled his grandmother or worse? Elio Petri's L'Assassino plays on this, as it were, guilt by implication, or by (moral) association, this hounded feeling that may seem to become guilt if the facts fit spiritually (though not, perhaps, literally), by taking the case of a man accused of murder who has every possible motive, and whose life, as the police go through it and he, for the first time, takes a clear-eyed look at it, exactly fits the pattern established for the murderer by the police: so much so that, with mounting hysteria, he comes to feel himself guilty.
The film was shown at the London Festival two years ago and has Marcello Mastroianni, whose appearance would seem to type him as the amiable hero, playing the kind of part in which he has since become so faniiliar—a mixture of all the vaguely raffish, vaguely dislikeable oldish men up to 8f, who have somehow managed, in spite of his rather cheery, burly, nice-looking rather than handsome appearance, to type him as the very opposite: a moral if not exactly a social spiv, with every shoddy, selfish quality gradually, as the film goes by, revealed; a sponger on women if not quite a gigolo, rather unkind to his loving old parents, rather inadequate to anyone who needs him, the film-style anti-hero personi- fied; in fact Mastroianni almost brilliantly keeps playing the same part, with variations comic or intellectual, however ill-suited it seems to his original face and manner. The writer in La Notte, the journalist of La Dolce Vita, the film-director of 84, cut down to size and shabbiness are all here, unpretentiously, in the antique-dealer who looks as if he killed his ex-mistress—because she was pregnant, because she was pressing him for money she had given him to get started up in his shop, because he wanted to marry a girl younger and richer.
The police, impersonally cruel, keep -jabbing and disclosing and the story looks like the classic one of a poor man who, having outgrown the help one woman can give him, seeks for the next who can start the process of giving over again. And all through the jabbing and disclosures the man keeps insisting that it isn't so, till one is torn (as he is) between facts, that say one thing, and feel- ings (or perhaps self-delusion) that say another. It is subtly done, the cinema of twitch and eye- brow and almost documentary flatness of tone; with madness just round the corner, almost a part of the flat, sad-toned landscape.
Latin American films (allowing for exceptions, as Miss Spark puts it) tend to be overheated, to say everything five times over and have raging proletarian heroes who vaguely resemble the sort of characters Pedro Armendariz used to play. Roberto Farias's The Train Robbers is all this with knobs on, fights and folklore and everyone shouting, and I suppose its topicality brought it here; for it deals with a train robbery in Brazil, carried out (though very seriously intentioned) in Marx Brothers style. It isn't good enough for interest or quite bad enough for fun, and its ideas of how 'the Vamp' or 'the Comic Drunkard' or 'the Handsome Cad' behaves go back to silent days.
In conjunction with the Eisenstein programme at the National Film Theatre goes an exhibition of Eisenstein's drawings at the Victoria and Albert. Being, I suppose, the most painterly of the great film-makers, it was natural he should pre- cede each film with dozens of sketches, some of which were directly followed, while others gave a rough idea to everyone involved with the film- making. And they were not, of course, merely for the benefit of others, but visual rehearsals for himself, and so of very great interest to anyone who has seen his films, the fluidity and plasticity of which are here so clearly reflected. The draw- ings on show (there are apparently thousands of others, awaiting exhibition) are mostly, but not exclusively, concerned with the films. A prolific and obviously fluent draughtsman, Eisenstein called his drawings 'visual reports in shorthand,' and, as in his films, used the irony and dark wit that served him in his early days as a political cartoonist. Their effect is often strangely violent and sinister, and they scared the wits out of my seven-year-old companion, who took refuge with the comforting enormity of Trajan's (plaster) Column next door.
ISABEL QUIGLY
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