Spice of Life
QUIGLY
national Film Theatre, Westbourne Grove.)—: The TWo Faces of Dr. Jekyll. (London
Pav- ilion.) — Foxhole in Caito. (Odeon, Leices- ter Sqbare.)
FELLIT■h's film titles tend • tO be untranslatable (what areyou"to do With 1 Vitellthii Of La Dolce Vita2-1wordS that con- Vita2-1wordS that con- lure' Whole social attitudes and ways of life). and &nee di Varied) turns rather pen-of4nY-auritishly into Lights' of Variety. Ten year's old and carried 1'Y its director " (co-director, actually,. with Lattuada) and Giulietta Masina's later fame, it is fairly unremarkable; but stuck' so full of por- tents and hints for the futUre. of Fellini's" private 43hsessions and favourite images, that for Fellini addicts it's well worth a visit. The mixture of F°PnedY, social realism and the visually grotesque Is there, pale, compared with its later manifesta- tsiinns, but surprisingly similar: fat girls in bikinis. "Imasitla impersonating Garibaldi, Verdi anddap°loon, jt provincial lawyer who looks like Farouk singing Figaro through the 'woods at night- and all the other, now familiar, Fellini moments; country roads, in tottering heel's. trains at dawn. midnight walks and those meetings of free vagabond spirits—when Fellini's characters are really at the bottom of things they go for a thrown and meet some me mad charmer who has they off the shackles of ordinary social life: they feel tempted to let go,' to run wild through blow night streets and jump into fountains and Frw' trumpets but nothing quite comes of it: are an expatriate American Negro and a doss- hnse cowboy, a Brazilian girl glaitarist and a has woman that, like so many Fellini images, „4s the 'unacceptableness' of life, a grotesqueness that is recognisable and alarming; like the star f a lush musical he shows us, of an eye-splitting vulgarity, whose. ancient, deformed, bolstered sexuality is unlikely but somehow hideously _edible. Other directors have a taste for the n_tesqUe, the unacceptably (in both senses) riwslful aspects of appearance: Bergman, for irestanee, has visual shocks, but how different in u.i.t.1 Everything Bergman touches is steeped 1asaccenuisriostznyge northern light, and even the ugly harmonious, even the terrifying is acceptable because of its dreamlike quality: whereas Fellini's shuck are the bro'ad daylight ugliness' of unvarnished moments and objects, the unselfconscious wallops that Latin life gives our more sheltered. flinching and rornantic northern temperaMent: and hiS *oddities have something to say, 'a passionate (though stunted) humanity. Lights,of Variety is about a middle- aged bon Juan in a fifth-ratetraVelling •ShoW, who gets caught by ,a mean little newcomer and ditched when she finds someone richer; and the adventures of the troupe, and the Archie Rice ghastliness of it all. Masina hasn't much to do but foreshadow her perky, aggressive, limited clowning future, as Fellini, with his world of outcasts in a wet carnival of the soul, fore- shadows much of his.
The rest: The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll (`X' certificate) is as silly and nasty a piece as Ham- mer mer and Terence Fisher (directing) have turned out .between them.; which is saying something. As too often with Hammer films, peculiarly horrid moral inversions and hypocrisies. isual and stated arguments at variance; e.g...tels■ II an old ugly, Hyde a,dashing charmer able to seduce his own wife whom (as Jekyll) he left cold; every shade of sadism and a polychromatic 'Vulgarity matched only by the loudness and ludicrousness of pretty well everyone around: Dawn..Addams, Christopher Lee,. and (defeated by \.:direction, script.. and spirit) the rather chameleon Paul Massa.
Foxhole in Cairo (director,: John Moxcy; 'A' certificatc): mild war thriller with James Robert-, son Justice as hii usual pleasint,self iind Albert I _level) (almost . ditto) as ,,kOnimel. Brisk ,,script with a few lapses ('he fans on me like a sick dog') and the usual, British fillet lack at present- able female personnel.
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