Christopher Hudson on Katharine Hepburn's festival triumph
In The Glass Menagerie (London Film Festival) there is a passage in which Jim O'Connor, the bouncy young shipping clerk from the warehouse, is sketching out his ambitions to Laura Wingfield. He is doing a night training course in radio engineering, he tells her, so that he can find work in television when it. gets off the ground, because television is the exciting new industry of the future; and he goes on to paint a glowing picture of what America will be like in days to come when everything will be so much better and finer than it is now in 1936.
It is a situation suffused with irony, for O'Connor comes from the outside world like a flare into the racked, embittered household, unwittingly to set alight the dry tinder of its animosities. But I choose this speech because it contains a deeper irony than Tennessee Williams could have foreseen at the time. To get off the ground at all. Anthony Harvey's superb film had to be made for a television network in the United States. Despite a magnificent performance as the Mother from Katharine Hepburn that ranks high among the great screen performances she has given in her lifetime, the Rank and ABC circuits are not interested in giving the film a release. After all — wasn't it made for television? In Britain too, in other words, it looks as if it will be consigned to the small screen, unless the Academy cinemas rescue it for a brief London run. And meanwhile, to the fanfare of a gala premiere and plans for saturation release,
comes the filmed version of a contemporary Broadway play, 40 Carats, that is to The Glass Menagerie as a paste diamond to solid gold.
To amend the dreary posters, I have never seen so much pap and
piffle in a single film. A fortyyear-old mother holidaying in Greece asks a passing motorcyclist, twenty-two if he's a day, to help mend her car. He can't, so they make passionate love all night, and she hitches a ride to Argos in the morning in a fishing-boat. Back in New York (could they have been anything else than Americans?) they meet up again when he comes round to take out her teenage daughter. He falls in love with her instead and the rest of the film is him persuading her to marry him. If you think that's tough on the daughter, don't worry — she marries mummy's middle-aged• business client, and love has well and truly conquered the generation gap.
What makes this drivel especially attractive to the pinkrinsed, butterfly-spectacled matrons who must have kept the Broadway show alive, is the amount of money around. The mother runs a fashionable Manhattan estate agency; the motorcyclist with whom she is stranded on an ouzo-soaked, myrtle-scented strand turns out, quite delightfully, to be the heir to a Pittsburgh steel fortune; the middle-aged business client is the sort of Texan who spends a hundred and fifty thousand dollars on a new flat without really noticing; only the matron's ex-husband, a television celebrity, has fallen on hard times and has to borrow the odd dollar to maintain his elegant wardrobe. The emotional problems of the very rich, naturally of perennial interest to American film producers, have never attracted my deepest sympathy, and here even Liv Ullman as the mother comes across as just one more beautiful mannequin — there's sensitive directing. When
you see Forty Carats because the local cinemas have nothing else to .offer, give a thought to Jim O'Connor and The -Glass
Menagerie.
The London Film Festival will be over by the time this issue appears. Of the films I missed, it seems to be widely accepted that Werner Herzog's Aguirre, The Wrath of God, Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive and Alain Tanner's Return from Africa deserve to be bought for exhibi
tion in this country. As far as I know, only Alain Tanner's film has been taken up.
Yoshida's Coup d'Etat was slow-moving and too severe for me. Carmelo Bene's One Hamlet Less, at the other extreme, in which a white-suited Hamlet ponced about with a half-nude Ophelia against all-white backgrounds, struck me as vapid and pointless, like an expensive, Fellini-esque fashion show in which the programmes have a Shakespearian theme. Also disappointing was Joseph Strick's latest film Janice about two young truckdrivers who pick up a tart and find themselves in trouble. As usual with Strick it is filmed with near-documentary attention to detail, especially squalid detail, but the story isn't lively enough, and the characters not in themselves interesting enough, to rescue us from a gloom which settles early in the film and never really lifts. I wrote last week in praise of Distant Thunder, and earlier in brief praise of Payday, directed by Daryl Duke, which for all its exhibitionism, created, in the central figure of country-and-western singer Maury Dann, a powerful image of a tough, self-possessed celebrity who goes over the top and begins to crack up although no one dare tell him so to his face. It is a sloppy film in many ways, but Rip Torn's impressive performance as Maury Dann will ensure that it stays around long after some of the more polished products have disappeared. It is far better than an unbearably pretentious Brazilian film Who is Beta?, an ambitious farrago about the survivors of a nuclear war, which takes refuge in arcane allegory whenever it is in danger of turning into genuinely enjoyable science fiction; better, too, than a more accomplished but still unsatisfactory new film from Andre Delvaux, Belle, about a writer who finds a mysterious girl in the woods and is enchanted by her, to the extent of neglecting his family and work, until an irrevocable act of violence forces him to distinguish between the dream and the reality. Filmed in the sparse, unpopulated landscape near Spa in the far east of Belgium, it creates an appropriately eerie atmosphere, but there is feyness about it, a lack of definition which dissipates the effect, and I found myself wondering what Polanski would have made of the story.
All of which brings me back to The Glass Menagerie, the other undoubted success of the Festival
and surely far superior to the other film of Tennessee Williams's play made in 1950 with Jane Wyman as Amanda Wingfield. Anthony Harvey builds up an at mosphere of intense claus trophobia in the shabby Wingfield .drawing-room, and the lacerating dialogue allied to superb perfor mances by Katharine Hepburn as Amanda, Sam Waterston as her son Tom, Joanna Miles as his sister Laura and Michael Moriarty as Jim O'Connor, leaves us feeling shaken and stunned by the end of the film. Let's hope that with the big distributors predictably blind to excellence, a smaller group will be able to give it limited release to the public,
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