Cinema

Movies on Show

By IAN CAMERON

Rendezvous at Midnight and Crime and Punishment 1962. (Cameo-Poly.)—The FOR film critics, this week has been just like the good old days when there was plenty of

product—the word is still used in parts of darkest Wardour Street. The hazards of film distribution have currently produced such a glut of press- shows that critics are presented with more films than they can adequately review. Inevitably something good but small has been passed over in the scramble: the deserving Rendezvous at Midnight has been obscured by the first screen appearance of James Bond, every intellectual's

favourite fascist, in Dr. No. With seven films to be covered, there is little space to spare for the three stinkers. Rather than take the cowardly way out, and just ignore them, I had better dis- pose of them quickly.

Dr. No (`A' certificate): no, no. Too inept to be as pernicious as it might have been. Costly

gloss flawed by insidious economy on girls. Superannuated Rank starlet tries to act sexy. Grotesque.

Crime and Punishment USA CAI called `C & P 1962' by distributors. Made, however, in 1958. Produced and directed by Saunders Brothers after original notion by F. Dostoievsky, suggesting lack of own ideas—confirmed by dead-beat direction. Their previous Time Out of War gained critical plaudits through its great debt to John Huston's Red Badge of Courage. Cut by sixteen minutes and I didn't feel a thing except gratitude.

The Quare Fellow ('X') is the worst British film for a whole fortnight, since The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. American ex-`B' feature writer/director Arthur Dreifuss is not the man one would immediately have thought suitable to direct such a script. If this, as the posters say, is the truth against hanging, then Dr. No is the truth about espionage.

So much for the bad ones. In a less crowded week each of the remaining four films would be worthy of consideration at length.

Louis Malle's Vie Privee has arrived, rather ISABEL QUIGLY is on holiday

well dubbed, as A Very Private Affair ('X'). Starring Bardot and Mastroianni, it is a fic- tional account of a Bardot-like star. It is filmed %ntirely in short snippets, some intimate, some Public, some significant, others less so. In be- tween scenes Malle often throws in shots of

newspaper cuttings which provide the audience with leads. And leads are all we get, whether

from the cuttings or the flat, functional dialogue. We are placed in the unprecedented position of having to use what we know about Bardot and Monroe to build up the whole story for our- selves. Malle, aided by Henri Decae's ravish- ingly soft colour and his own considerable lack of interest in telling the story, has spent all his energies on making the film decoratively elegant. And very fancy it is, too.

Roger Leenhardt's Rendezvous at Midnight ('X') is also about the cinema, but this time seen from the receiving end. Leenhardt is one of the most respected of the elder generation of French film critics. This is only his second feature film. Its theme is illusion and reality

in the cinema. More particularly, it deals with the relationship of the characters on the screen

to the people in the audience, with the nature of identification. Leenhardt has made the film within the film itself; it is called Le Rendez-vows

de 'nitwit and stars Lilli Palmer as the heroine, Anne Leuven. In the audience is Eva Kroly. a failed actress of Hungarian descent, played bY Lilli Palmer. Also appearing briefly as herself is Lilli Palmer.

Palmer/Kroly envies Palmer/Palmer her suc- cess. When she goes to the film, quite by acci- dent, she becomes obsessed by it, and sees it over and over. Her envy turns to identification with the character on the screen, Palmer/Palmer. She even tries to imitate Anne Leuven in her clothes.

Because she wants to be Lilli Palmer, and her only evidence of what Lilli Palmer is like comes

from her screen persona, she cannot try to be-

come the actress but only the character. At the end of the film Anne Leuven commits suicide

by jumping into the Seine under the Pont Mirabeau, and so Eva Kroly resolves to have the same sad, beautiful, phoney death, although, unlike Anne, she has not been dropped bY a lover. She doesn't have one.

When Eva rushes out of the cinema, a man follows her. He tries to dissuade her from suicide. We are hardly surprised to learn that he is a film critic—of the newspaper rather than the specialist variety. His attitude is one of de- tachment tempered with kindness. As they e° around together, Eva recalls bits of the film for him, even acting scene—badly. Through the two characters Leenhardt explores opposing attitudes to the cinema. In the final scene, under the Pont Mirabeau, of course, it is detachment that pro- vides a solution. It is all very precisely worked out and well executed in a steady pre-new-wave style. 1 have always found that one Lilli Palmer would justify a visit to any film. Rendez" vents at Midnight has three Lilli Palmers speaking four different languages, each with two different degrees of fluency. The new film at the Coliseum, The Password is Courage ('U'), is a British war film about escapes from POW camps by a certain Sergeant- major Charles Coward, who was technical ad- viser on the film in which he is played by Dill Bogarde. It respects all the conventions of the British war film, except one: it's good. By mix- ing its very taut suspense sequences with very endearing comedy about blowing up munitions trains, and burning down POW camps, it some- how avoids all the horrors of the stiff-upper-lip movie, without being very different. The Ameri- can writer and director, Andrew Stone, is one of those people who has been making very good thrillers in Hollywood for a number of years without receiving much notice. Apart from his merits as a director, he is also something of a pioneer, for fifteen years ago, ten years before anyone mentioned the words 'new wave,' he was already using their techniques of filming entirely on location with a minimum of people and equipment. Now he succeeds because, although The Password is Courage uses British locations masquerading, often with qualified success, as Germany and Poland, everything is real, and the whole thing gains a feeling of actuality which is almost unobtainable in the studio sets.

This week at the Plaza there is a re-issue of Hitchcock's 1955 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much ('A'). When it came out, every- one knocked it for being less tense than its pre- decessor, simply because it was a good half-hour longer and much more elaborate. Much of the extra time is spent in getting to like the couple whose child is kidnapped. Hitchcock knows better than his critics and he sets out to use our liking for the couple to help break down our resistance to suspense. It is a measure of his astounding skill that one is still thrilled when one knows what is going to happen.