CINEMA

Fathers and sons

PENELOPE HOUSTON

Killer! (Cinecenta and Gala Royal, 'A') Handel (Cameo Poly, `U')

Beyond argument, Claude Chabrol is now established as one of the real, rare pro- fessional's professionals, in a trade where it is still often more than enough to look ingeniously amateurish. His camera will un- failingly be found to be moving in the right direction at the right time; his control of scenes can swing a mood from suspicion to farce in the blink of a Hitchcockian eyelid; above all, he has the confidence to be classically quiet.

Everything is so limpid and lucid that one gazes down, as through the glass bottom of the film, at the more opaque depths of the tank where Chabrol stocks his ambiguities and uncertainties. His films, to me, have the attraction of those three-star restaurant meals he rather enjoys showing: confident pleasures, to be remembered af- terwards perhaps with some detachment as well as greed. I also suspect that I may be temperamentally inclined to underrate Chabrol, seeing too much of the perfect headwaiter and too little of the inventively temperamental chef.

His new film, Killer!, is adapted from an early Nicholas Blake novel, 7'4 Beast Must Die, about a father's obsessive determination to seek out and destroy the hit and run driver who killed his little boy. The novel is set in the Cotswolds; the film, most strikingly, in Brittany, with the sea adding a dimension of fatalism to a thriller plot worked out as

though by a Euclidian Cassandra. In- triguingly, when the detective story is often condescended to as a rather evanescent line of work, Chabrol and his scriptwriter, Paul Gegauff, have found no need to update or significantly vary anything in Nicholas Blake's 1936 novel—until the end, where they dispense altogether with the amateur detective and standard spread of suspects to sharpen the story to its psychological point.

How, though, Chabrol manages to im- prove on his source. In the book, the hunter gets a first hint of his prey's whereabouts by a fairly thundering coincidence. Chabrol's film accepts the improbability (two cars becoming stuck, weeks apart, in the same stretch of muddy lane), prepares for it by having his hero explicitly throw himself on the subtle mercies of chance, introduces it by an almost magical shot of an advancing stranger whose function is clearly going to be much more than merely getting the car unstuck—and then backtracks, instantly and brilliantly, to the Hitchcockian humour and detail of a rural cross-questioning. The trail

eventually leads Charles (Michel Duchaussoy) to his quarry, a Quimper garagiste (Jean Yanne) who is an ex- ceptionally full-blown member of the tribe of Chabrol's hateful middle-class. No doubt he sells dud cars; certainly he jeers at his wife, browbeats his son, carries on with his partner's wife, eats piggishly and suffers hypochondriacally. Chabrol dooms him as boor, bully and bourgeois.

Charles, procrastinating Hamlet-like on the brink of murder, becomes affectionately concerned for the son of the house; who, like himself, has become a little crazed through loathing of his father. In a most typically Chabrolian dilemma, sympathetic characters are murderously obsessed, while the odious, sane garagiste kills only by accident, on a blind corner. The ending retains enough of the whodunnit not to be revealed, though it has a logic implicit in the film's melancholy pattern of fathers and sons. It also in- troduces a weary, professional, very likeable policeman, one of those characters Chabrol stirs into instant life, as he does the bereaved father's wizened housekeeper, or the little family group exchanging deliciously dread- ful chat about air pollution and the new novel while waiting for the ogre's return. And, for sheer masterly control, by a gourmet of situation rather than sensation, it would be hard to beat the restaurant scene in which whispered agonies of betrayal are ex- changed over the table, while a duck is meticulously carved, sauced and served. Chabrol's cuisine is, as they say, worth a detour; the dissection of motive, with all its shifts and ambiguities kept in balance, is worth more than that.

'Oh that this tew, tew solid flesh would melt ...' Nicol Williamson's Roundhouse, or Roundhead, Hamlet, with its shaving-brush bristle of intelligence, its alertness, militancy and speed, is so formidably armed for attack that those pinched and depressed vowel sounds hit one almost like a stab in the back. For this actor, words like 'too', 'through', 'dew' and 'adieu' (heard in all too close pro- ximity in Hamlet) really seem to pinch the mouth and shrivel up the breath. It is not a question of accent; not, certainly of any pining after the golden mellifluences of a Gielgud.

But there are intonations that ex- pand a character and intonations that reduce, and these inescapably are of the reducing kind. Nicol Williamson can sound quite disconcertingly like Mr Ian Smith ex-

plaining why he can't negotiate with the British government; and in some of his vocal swoops and plunges an even odder political echo emerges—Mr George Brown, in full peroration.

Otherwise, Tony Richardson's film of his recent stage production gives lessons to other movie directors who have been trying to cram theatre quarts into televisionish pint- pots. Richardson sensibly makes no effort to camouflage the scale (and heavily cut text) he is working on: everything is speeded, con- centrated and hardened. Hamlet runs after an unseen ghost through the Roundhouse's bare London brick corridors and arches. Ex- cept for the play scene, a piece of flarine mummery and the film's effective centre, and for one rather unlikely moment when Claudius and Gertrude are found picnicking in bed, as though sitting up for Tom Jones on the Elsinore late show, backgrounds are persistently dark. Actors tend to loom into view from the shoulders up, faces locked in conspiratorial close-up. The court's a murky place; and the words, if attenuated, are thrown into sharp relief.

Some curiosities are also accentuated. Anthony Hopkins' judicious and excellently Welsh Claudius looks if anything slightly younger than his grizzled nephew; Judy Parfitt's marbled Gertrude seems almost ex- travagantly of an age with her son. But apart from Marianne Faithfull's frail, ashen Ophelia, everyone at Elsinore seems to have grown old conspiring. In a sense, it seem, curious that this brisk, spare, devious, plot- hungry and almost ferociously unpoetic Hamlet should produce such an impression of visual middle-age—hard lighting glarine on furrowed brows, and catching Nicol Williamson at extraordinary jungle angles. with the white of the eye visible all around the iris.

But it is the twisting and turning intelligence and sheer blank rage of the part which Nicol Williamson decisively 'em- phasises, and the claustrophobic production faithfully follows its prince. Perhaps the most striking single image is of Williamson alone, scratching and tearing at the bare brick with his dagger, more like a rat in the trap of the long corridor than a Hamlet who still hopes to win. It is a production of its time, just, as the Olivier movie belonged to the romantic 1940s, and as KozintseN's brilliantly conceived Russian film gave us a Hamlet at the court of King Stalin.