Cinema

Mugger's game

Kenneth Robinson

Death Wish Director: Michael Winner Stars: Charles Bronson 'X' Paramount (95 minutes)

The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 Director: Joseph Sargeant Stars: Walter Matthau, Robert Shaw 'AA' Leicester Square Theatre (105 minutes)

Death Wish is the story of a New Yorker who makes a habit of shooting muggers. He does this because the police cannot find the men who killed his wife and sent his daughter to a mad house.

The film very nearly asks the question: Is it right for civilians to take the law into their hands? But it soon becomes less of a morality tale than a crime thriller. Quite a good

one too, but not as good as the book by Brian Garfield. What I liked about the original was the author's reference to the reasons for mugging. Every night, he says, hundreds of New Yorkers are temporarily deranged, either because they have taken drugs or because they cannot get them.

I also preferred the ending of the original story. The city's vigilante has just destroyed three muggers when he sees that a policeman is watching. The policeman turns away, leaving him free to continue his unofficial clean-up campaign. There is nothing here of the highlevel decisions the police make in the film. The public, they say, must not be encouraged to have a go themselves. So the offending vigilante must be removed from the city.

A lot has been said about the stomach-turning violence of this picture and about the unnerving audience laughter that follows each mugger's death. The killings are, in fact, quick, clean and unconvincing. City violence is becoming as conventional as the old Cowboysand-Indians stuff. I believe people laugh at the acts of revenge simply because these are so unreal. Today's cinema corpses mean as little as a fat opera-singer falling from the battlements in Tosca.

You can in fact, keep your eyes wide open throughout this film without being shocked. Even the opening murder-and-assault sequence is harmless enough. This is partly because it was filmed with a hand-held camera which lurched about missing all the nastiest bits. For me this effect of high drama on a rough sea can make even the saddest of scenes slightly farcical.

The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 has a simple plot. Four men hijack a subway train and ask for ransom money. This is more entertaining than Death Wish because you don't have to keep looking for moral overtones. You are too busy asking three questions. How can the ransom money be rushed across the crowded city in time? Who will be killed? (Somebody has to be, and it is odd to find oneself hoping it is 'only' a man in uniform). And the third question to ask is: How are the hijackers planning to escape from the subway?

All good clean fun. Even if the police, the criminals and the railwaymen of New York know only one four-letter word between them. This makes them sound a little silly. But they are silly. Largely because the film version of the book has a lot of comedy that is not in John Godey's original. The director cuts frequently from tension below ground to comedy above. Walter Matthau gets just enough funny lines as a transport policeman to make you wish he had more. And just enough to stop you taking Robert Shaw and his fellow hijackers too seriously.

Incidentally, for British audiences the driverless runaway train cannot be terrifiyng. It is too reminiscent of Oh Mr Porter and The Titlield Thunderbolt.

One more thing. Do not miss the last thirty seconds of the picture. They are not only vital to the plot but ills( ) very tunny.

Variations and the 'Cello Concerto there is a world of difference: the latter is altogether an old man's work, although he was a mere sixty-two at the time. But in Tippett's case the forthright, determined probing of the 'forties is still evident now; he continues to absorb and mould foreign influences, such as Hindemith, Stravinsky and Schoenberg (not-ably in the Piano Concerto) and so internationalise the English tradition in which he is firmly rooted.

It is often observed that the various phases of his output are centred round each of the operas, particularly the last two. This trend and the suppression of his juvenilia will probably mean that he will be seen not as a composer of the traditional brand, who 'peaked' at a certain time, but as one whose several phases are equally valuable, yet complementary. Certainly Stravinsky too had no identifiable golden period of maturity, but his separate phases show a red-cheeked breathlessness from change of direction which Tippett has avoided.

The First Symphony is a substantial, exciting work which deserves fuller study than it has so far received. At first it was neglected because of the sheer difficulty of the parts, but maybe the recent successful, if slightly apprehensive, Festival Hall performance by the RLPO under Sir Charles Groves will encourage renewed attempts. Much of the string-writing breathes Purcell, not only in the chaconne of the Adagio. The snappy rhythms of the Elizabethan madrigalists which pervade Tippett's music abound throughout, and there are some wonderful sounds — especially in the division of the chaconne scored for three flutes, while the violas and 'cellos share the ground bass.

The oratorio, A Child of Our Time (1942), was given the previous evening by the LPO and Choir with John Pritchard conducting. Modelled on the recitative-aria-chorale structure of the Bach Passions, it is a powerful cry against oppression, sparked off by an incident in 1938, involving a young Jewish boy and the Nazis. The Purcellian word-setting is particularly telling in the opening chorus, but sometimes the repetition of phrases becomes laboured (as in the tenor's "I have no money"), while the crucial word in "How can I grow to a man's stature" is at first obscured amid a falling phrase. Somehow the performance took a long time to get airborne, probably because of

the painfully inadequate solo quartet. The Canadian soprano, Nancy Gottschalk, fluttered about uneasily (how I would love to hear Jessye Norman's silvery overlay in the spiritual '0 by and by' — now there's a singer), while Donald Bell's tone, more tenor than bass, was not nearly dark enough for 'Go down, •Moses', which was anyway too bland: where were the vast reserves of wrath in the rising phrase "Let my people go!"? Ryland Davies was frequently inaudible, and gasped the boy's final appeal from prison ("Mother, mother!") with as much anguish as a squeaky doll.

For some reason everything gelled for the climactic ensemble when the darkness of winter gives way to spring. Suddenly one remembered what is so special about this work, and about all Tippett's music: an unmistakable beauty keeps breaking out, whether it sears or tickles, thrills or floods. It may be simple or direct (as in the Double Concerto) or obscure and mystical (as in The Vision of St Augustine), but this man has an unerring perception of musical poetry.