Cinema
An Adult Goes West
By ISABEL QUIGLY The Big Country, (Odeon, Leicester Square.) — The Young Have No Time. (Cameo-Poly.) — Auntie Mame. (Warner.) The Big Country (director : William Wyler; 'A' certificate) is my sort ,of film, and I knew it the minute I saw the credits sprawled across the whirling spokes of an -enormous wheel. Whoopee, I said to myself (or something like it) and settled back for 165 minutes of glory.
'Big' is just the word for it. It is big in scope and size and length, bristling with big names, and with a director who has the whole plunging, energetic, exuberant film so well in hand, from its splendid opening shot of the vast countryside, that you hardly notice how obvious its action is, how foreseeable every incident; it has big acting, over- lifesize characters, a family feud on the grand scale; above all, it has the Western ethic, that way of life evolved for a big country, where the law at ilrst meant the morality of individuals, and a man was rated as he stood with his neighbours. Yes, The Big Country can really make you regret being born only a very few years too late for the biggest excitement of modern times: The story is no great shakes, being the old one about the proud upstarts and their riff-raff neigh- bours, and the rivalry of the two over water for their cattle; but it has a love story alongside it that really makes sense—in so far as'you can talk of love making sense : what I mean is, a credible love story, the hero's switch,:over from one girl to another being something so gradual yet so inevitable that you know it's happening before he does, and wonder why he doesn't. And, besides, it has something, to say about the character of the Western hero, and about courage, and what it means.
It shows the hero in the undignified position of looking a coward, of smiling when you almost feel he ought to be angry; at one point it even makes you want to join in the catcalls and con- demnation. It shows a man refusing to revenge a trifling offence to his person and a rather more serious offence to his dignity by the easy means of joining the posse raised to defend him; it shows him refusing to fight when called a liar and chal- lenged to prove he isn't one, and refusing to ride an impossible horse simply to give fun to the spectators. Then it turns round to show how his is adult courage, and the usual Western stuff—the quick-on-the-draw tough guyness, the smarting sense of honour—is childish and even barbaric. His values are shown as the sane, the adult; and we see how a single civilised man could (so great was the scope of the individual in those days and in that country) civilise an enormous deal of brutality.
And this is linked up with the love story. The girl he has come West to marry wants proof of his valour, wants repeated winning, repeated tokens of love, a knight-errant.with a hat full of her favours; the girl he grows to love accepts him as he is, trusts him without proofs or tokens or even speech. And so you believe in their love, as something beyond just the fact that he is the hand- some Gregory Peck and she the attractive Jean Simmons (growing richer, fuller, more individual in personality and appearance, incidentally, each time we see her), since acceptance of the other person, not wishful thinking, is the essence of love: positive not wistful or resigned acceptance, the wish resolved, which is what you feel here. And to give this dimension to a rather sketchily developed love story is unusual—especially in a Western, where subtlety is reserved for ballistics, as a rule, more than for love.
Burl Ives, in a red vest, is a tremendous grubby patriarch, ljust on the right side of absurdity; Charlton Heston, who was Moses not long ago in a famous piece of nonsense, has a James Dean part—sulky, lounging, upstart, counter-heroic- which he is too clean and upstanding to make much of; Carroll Baker, the anti-heroine, is every spoilt Rosemond Vincy sort of girl that ever sulked at an adult courtship; and Charles Bickford, look- ing more than ever like Mr. Malcolm Muggeridge, is the father she adores and measures every man against. And an actor called Chuck Connors, whom we shall surely see again, plays the mean, blond, dirty villain with such an air of crazy, high- spirited, degenerate evil about him that you seem to feel his nasty presence stinking away there, and turn your face aside with disgust : a remarkable bit of extra-sensory perception, in the literal sense, that.
The Young Have No Time (director : Johannes Allen; 'X' certificate) is one of those eye-openers. How do Copenhagen teenagers behave? Here you have it, and I imagine it is no truer or less true than any other eye-opener, which simply means it may be true in some cases and untrue in others. Even in one's own circle of friends, people's out- look and behaviour, and outlook on other people's behaviour or on their own, in matters of sex or of love are so varied that it is impossible to generalise: so how much more impossible it is when it conies to a whole city, nation, age-group or class. The most you can deduce very positively from a film like this is that Danish schoolchildren of the upper middle classes are given a good deal of freedom by their parents : the incidence of virginity among them (with the other points it raises) is only one of those things you could (presumably) prove one way or another, depend- ing on which schoolchildren you happen to deal with. The best thing about it are the glimpses of polite domestic misery—the deflating wife (`You really mustn't repeat yourself, dear'), the husband announcing he is off on a business trip to Ham- burg, and the wife knowing exactly what that means; and two young people, played by Ghita Norby and Frits Helmuth, who really make one remember what it felt like to be in love at seven- teen—which is the real eye-opener, it seems to me, not any of the unprovable documentary stuff.
Auntie Mame (director : Morton DaCosta; 'A' certificate) I simply cannot take, and sat, growing progressively glummer, through its two hours and twenty-three minutes. It seems to be one of those (fairly rare) occasions when the Atlantic is really a barrier, and we laugh at too separate things. Of course a number of the jokes must have a point we miss, or catch the spent tail end of; but of all the inflated, tasteless, exaggerated pieces of un- likeable idiocy, this seems to me just about the worst. As the preposterous Auntie Mame Rosa- lind Russell does her best and achieves a few extraordinary moments : and then the film rocks. wildly, because she is suddenly much too good for it, much too human, much too tasteful, un- inflated, unexaggerated and likeable: which is all very puzzling and nightmarish, and for all the tea in China I wouldn't sit and glower through it again.
Previous page
