Through Eastern Windows
The Unvanquished. (Academy.)— Sayonara. (Warner.)—A Tale of Two Cities. (Odeon, Leicester Square.) THERE are two films about distant parts this week, about places with unknown and, to most of us here, exotic customs and unfamiliar ways of dealing with emotion and human relation- ships; and very neatly they contrast the two opposing ways of showing a place to the rest of the world. One takes the simplest, the other the most spectacular, side of life there; one is an inside, the other a foreigner's, view. One shows us everyday life, explaining little, commenting hardly at all; the other shows us everything un- usual, different from ourselves, with footnotes and illustrations; one selects, as every work of art must do, the other collects, like an encyclopaedia. One has no propagandist aim, the other tries its hardest to wave a liberal flag; but it is the first that makes us feel the similarity of races, the metaphorical life of people binding them through every acciden- tal difference, and the other that puzzles and dis- heartens with the apparent disparity between one culture and the next, and the almost insuperable barriers to understanding.
The first is Satyajit Ray's sequel to his beautiful Pather Panchali, which carries on the story of the poorish Bengali family—Harihar, his wife, and the small son Abu—after they have moved to Benares. The roundness and completeness of the first film made me approach its sequel warily, wondering if the flavour of the first film could possibly be repeated. It isn't : we no longer see things with the eyes of childhood; but the film is as rounded and complete as its predecessor. You do not need to see one film to appreciate the other; each gives a full rich view of an India no foreigner could hope to penetrate, a view that comes from the unselfconscious sight of humdrum moments. We never know, for instance, what the meal exactly consists of : but we see how it is eaten, and the particular movement of hand and head become after a while as familiar, almost,'as the European movements with knife and fork. Clothes, housework, the daily routine, are never explained, exactly : we simply see them in action, hear scraps of conversation, catch glimpses of this and that. And out of the scraps, the unforced moments of uneventful days, a complete, even elaborate picture is built up. Where, before, the picture was lyrical, a child's outward-looking view of things, it is now a dreamier, less explicit one. Abu is no longer a child of bright charm and brilliant watching eyes; he grows into a skinny, moustached adolescent, inward-looking, guarded, who must fight for the right to go his own way, and must seem to treat his widowed mother, at times, with harshness. Alone, she clings to her son; the break is inevitable, and seems perhaps crueller than it would in a Western context be- cause the formality of Indian family relationships forbids the expressions of affection we find nor- mal. Cold greetings and cold goodbyes, they look on the face of it between mother and son;' but underneath is the eternal cycle of the generations that everyone can understand, touchingly and above all truthfully examined.
The other film is the much-trumpeted Sayonara, an idyll set in the new fashionable. film country, Japan. It is long but seems much longer, showing us a postcard land of blossom, and bridges humped over gurgling streams, and tea cere- monies, and saki ceremonies, and festivals with fireworks, and kimonos, and "hot baths, and the rest of it; and since a little sightseeing, in any country, goes a long way, one very soon starts longing for a bit of simple Japanesery without all that obtrusive local detail. As propaganda, it is a plea for understanding of marriages between Americans and Japanese (American men, that is, and Japanese women : when it comes to an American girl being attracted by a Japanese man, he is played, with a grotesque lot of eye-screwing, by Ricardo Montalban). Marlon Brando plays a dyed-in-the-wool Southern officer, son of a general, engaged to a general's daughter, and well set in the military groove; when we first meet him a reactionary, a prig, and something of a bore. His performance I found merely eccentric. Maybe Southerners are really as mannered as this, maybe they crunch and mumble up their words so that you have to strain to catch a phrase here and there : Baby Doll and her friends, after all, made us accept them as a good deal odder. But Paul Osborne, who wrote the script from James Mitchener's novel, is no Tennessee Williams, nor is Joshua Logan, the director, an Elia Kazan; and Brando's hero, perhaps for this reason, struck me as artificial and unlikely, a caricature of all literary Southerners, with their grunting elegance, their slightly well-fed physique (sulking, Brando looks unappetisingly like our Elvis), their faintly degenerate formality, their absurd insistence on the ancientness of their civilisation. Pooh ! One loves (I do, at any rate) the literary South, like
the cinematic West, but at moments the steamy air gets oppressive and makes one long to lift the lid and clear it; and this Method-trained Southern hero is getting to be rather repetitive. A newcomer called Red Buttons and an enchanting and un- glamorised Japanese actress called Miyoshi Umeki, as a husband and wife who choose death rather than separation, give the film its only touches of solid truth. The Japanese heroine, Miiko Taka, is beautiful but wholly unconvinc- ing : like the whole film, in fact.
Dickens's plots (overgrown with a tangle of minor characters, uproarious or melodramatic asides, flashbacks, sidetracks, and the sheer in- ability to say anything in a straightforward sort of way, that almost entirely obscures the main action) do well in the cinema, that pruner and selector of literature and, when it wants to be, of life. Seeing the new British Tale of Two Cities I got the hang, for the first time, of those gargoyle- like ladies Madame Defarge and the Vengeance, and Prossie, and old Doctor Manette and the rest of them. Ralph Thomas's direction and T. E. B. Clarke's script between them make the whole thing beautifully lucid, with some good crowd scenes that manage to suggest cloudy prints and modern fury all at once, and an unobtrusively dramatic use of the guillotine knife in the last min- utes. Dirk Bogarde makes a wan, wistful Sydney Carton, Dorothy Tutin an out-of-period Lucie and of the minor characters Rosalie Crutchley's in- spired hamming as Madame Defarge sticks in my head for being exactly like an animated Phiz
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