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Great stuff Fallowell
IPT.shnit's Entertainment Director: ek Haley Jnr. 'Ll' Dominion (138 'la, flutes) Miller Director: Peter Bogir,i,anovich Stars: Cybill Shepherd, QAar.trY Brown, Cloris Leach man. 'LP ''3C2 Shaftesbury Avenue (92 tninutes) Rob Marsei/le Contract Director: ,rohert Parrish. Stars: Michael ;.,-;raine, Anthony Quinn, James n".:Z.?tne-s')A' Warner West End I (90 /121,_e Parallax View Director: Alan 1:bnia. Stars: Warren Beatty, Pau ndinutes "entias. 'AA' Paramount (103 ) Frirn"flueile Director: Just Jaeckch Star: Sylvia Kristel. 'X' Prince arles (92 minutes) d• nn't know where we got all our 'rom," says Mickey Rooney n • °ut himself and Judy Garland at -nre.:wac MGM. He must be the only s° who does not. The daily _eherinle: up at dawn, amphetamines, work barbiturates, sleep. har' rb.,-'1), rise that several of the took stars sometimes ook too Many and never woke up
again. No surprise either that Judy Garland occupies so much of That's Entertainment. Apart from being MGM's greatest female singer, the producer and director of this picture, Jack Haley Jnr., married Liza Minnelli last week. Vincent Minnelli, of course, made many of the films included in MGM's song and dance showcase.
It is not quite true that MGM bossed the Hollywood musical from start to finish. The most popular of the lot, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, are essentially associated with RKO, Busby Berkley with Warner Brothers. And the presentation of it all is not perfect. The black and white clips particularly are hard to look at, being very grainy when inflated to the dimensions of a. parade ground.. I think it was a mistake to crudely rechannel the sound into stereo: tap-dancers crashing at you from the left, a thousand violins ragtiming it from the right, some aural dizziness here. All by way of introducing a little niggling perspective into a picture which for once has had all the critics rushing ' back to their youth and lapping like starved cats. It was interesting to have the stars today introducing each other's work from the past. 'We all change a bit over the years.' Mickey Rooney again. He was never a beauty but of all of them time has been most cruel to him. The water woman was new to me, Esther Williams who with the help of her exotically deranged directors signed and sealed the aqua epic. Quite breathtaking, quite ... words fail me, actually. MGM hit the tops in the 'forties and 'fifties: Singing In the Rain, American In Paris, Showboat, Seven Brides, Gigi, on and on we go, although it has to be said that the real landmark in the post-war screen musical was West Side Story. And latterly wasn't there something called the Sound of Music? Anyway, two and a quarter hours is a very long time. I was prepared to sit there all day.
Daisy Miller also takes us into another world. Based on the Henry James story, it is set at the beginning of the century in the American colony at Rome. Cybill Shepherd, playing Daisy, the outrageously innocent flirt travelling Europe with Mama (Cloris Leachman), is immensely pretty and unbearably irritating. She talks at a hundred miles an hour from the word go and you know that something must happen before the first ten minutes have gone to shut her up, or at least slow her down. But it doesn't. Which is a pity. The period is wondrously ensnared and all that, everything is flowers, muslin, big gilt chairs, and the plonk of the hoof on the cobble. And who does not adore Rome? At this rate Peter Bogdanovich, the man who brought you The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon, should soon be remaking Ten Million Years BC. Slight but perfectly watchable. Which is far more than can be said for The Marseille Contract, a picture about the heroin racket, featuring sports cars and glitzy beach clubs, as well as James Mason's silliest honking Chevalier accent. If it were on television, which it should be, people who go, in for selective viewing would switch it off. On the other hand The Parallax View, in more or less the same genre, is a genuine thriller of the post-Watergate age, a very spooky and dramatically shot story about the machinations behind the death of an American Presidential candidate. It sounds dull, another CIA paranoia cult spin-off, but it explores its objectionable theme with a frighteningly acute eye. Does Warren Beatty know the secret of life? He appears to grow younger by the reel and brings to a stock character the kind of boneheaded urgency which says he's jus gotta get to the bottom of this thing ' no matter how many times he's slugged in the mouth. Also, unless my eye cheats me, he has done much of his own hair-raising stunt work.
Emmanuelle is the sort of piece the French do very well, or if you do not like that kind of thing, do very badly, the intense sex film. The setting in Bangkok can be considered its single interesting twist. Otherwise it is notable for having projected Sylvia Kristel (marvellous name) into the gossip columns and fashion pages. She looks good, and that basically is what the film is all about; yet here again one's vision is constantly distracted by the soulful sub-Freudian verbosity of the protagonists who just cannot let sleeping dogs get on with it. But you have to admire their attempts to turn Tango into an industry.
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