Old-Fashioned
OF the four bad films chance has thrown up this week (it threw three good ones last week), only one is any sort of a success, because only one knows it's bad, admits it's bad, plans to be bad, and so gets away with it. Band of Angels knows where it's going—straight to the old-fashioned heart of the old-fashioned kernel of cinemagoers who have been lapping up heavy costume drama through the years and will go on lapping it up through the centuries ahead. Sidney Poitier, who was the Negro in A Man is Ten Feet Tall, brings a whiff of out-of-place dignity to his role as an ex-slave to whom the Civil War brings legal but not spiritual release from the past. For the rest you have Yvonne de Carlo as one of those high-spirited Southern girls who lived on plantations in enormous picture hats before the Civil War; only this time it's different, because her mother (though she doesn't know it) was a slave, and her father, having brought her up as the daughter of the house, fails to provide for her in his will, so that when he dies she is sold to Clark Gable. The long dis- entangling (if that is the word) of their fiery rela- tionship takes us through a lot of lush Southern countryside and three huge plantation houses straight out of Baby Doll. Director : Raoul Walsh.
This leaves the good triers, the takers-of-them- selves-seriously. The most serious, that comes the biggest cropper, is Jeanne Eagels, the story of a Broadway actress who rampaged her way into the limelight and sozzled her way out of it in the Twenties. Kim Novak, her hard little doll's face whitened, her eyes ringed with black, puts 1 on a cloche hat and plays this Bernhardt character with the exhausting inadequacy of a schoolgirl doing Falstaff with a stomachful of cushions. And Jeff Chandler, who is fine as frontier marshals and suchlike, is defeated by his part as an Italian funfair man who buys up a chunk of Coney Island and gives Miss Eagels her final chance with the performing seals. Director : George Sidney.
Serious too is the British film of the batch, Campbell's Kingdom, about whose progress in the Dolomites I have been reading bulletins for months past. This has most of the superficial virtues of British films of the moment, with one important, undermining vice : that it thinks people will swallow an unintelligent story and a cliché- ridden script. Ralph Thomas's direction is com- petent, and a good British cast including some war-horses like James Robertson Justice and Athene Seyler does its best. Dirk Bogarde as the hero is, as always, intelligent and puts in rather more than he need or even, more's the pity, than the part can take; the scenery—which is meant to be in Canada—is superb. A worthy effort, but not quite grown up.
To complete this glum column is Nero's Week- end, in which two of Italy's best comedians, Alberto Sordi and Vittorio de Sica, as Nero and Seneca, and Gloria Swanson as a well- upholstered Agrippina, are all dubbed into the un- wittiest of French, which cannot decide whether to plump for satire, drawing-room comedy, or roaring St. Trinian's farce, and dabble their toes rather gingerly in the unmentionable waters of imperial behaviour. With a few mild orgies and Brigitte Bardot, as Poppwa, in a bath of asses' milk. Director: Steno.
ISABEL QUIOLY
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