Cinema
A touch of paranoia
Duncan Falluwell
The Silent One Director: Claude Pinoteau, Star: Lino Ventura. Studio One, 'A' (113 minutes).
Spring Into Summer Director: Pascal Thomas. Stars: Annie Cole, Frederic Duru, Bernard Menez. Curzon 'AA' (117 minutes)
Dead Cert Director: Tony Richardson. Stars: Judi Dench, Scott Anthony, Michael Williams. London Pavilion 'A' (100 minutes).
To turn up at a cinema after profitably missing a night's sleep, having nearly been smacked at Oxford Circus by a foreign lorry, with a lump in one's groin which a doctor one had hoped to trust described as 'nothing at all, tissues and sinews' while one clenched for the impending rupture of at least an appendix, damn sun beating outside to boot, does not bode well for any film, so it was via something of a minor coup that The Silent One could actually engage one's curiosity, even concern, in the exasperating ivory towers of nuclear espionage and counterespionage. If Ventura's sagging face is inclined to resemble a St Bernard thwarted of its third bon-bon then it could be because officially, as far as the documents are concerned, he is dead throughout the film. As if this were not enough to bear, like the fanciful alchemists they are in seeking to transmute theory into fact, the KGB are pursuing him with firearms. Sympathy for someone unpleasantly caught between the devil and the deep blue sea may be strained by the bathetic French piano music rising to flaccid crescendoes of pity as he re-encounters his wife, since remarried, treks up a mountain to get beyond machine-gun range, or drives to Geneva in a final attempt to engineer his survival. Since, however, the music has the soundtrack all to itself on such occasions, a sensation for which 'pathos' seems too extravagant a word can be achieved by putting a finger in each ear. The impact of our own Robert Hardy as the ghastly blond-haired smoothie MI5 boyo is impoverished by the tact that he is consistently out of sync with his dialogue. The KGB on the other hand are distinctly enigmatic, although how they are permitted to incorporate into their hunt lavish shoot-ups on trains and in other public places without attracting enormous national attention is never explained.
From these bitter heights we descend to Spring Into Summer, the world which burgeons as Ventura drives madly by in his Fiat, puberty a la campagne that is. Annie, somewhere in the second half of her teens, is Chubby, extremely pretty, and begins the film at the dawn of adulthood rolling in the haystack With her mechanic boyfriend. She wears mini skirts to church and does not look as if she were ever a virgin. She ends the film having been deflowered by a provincial Playboy enamoured of things English. He drives a Triumph TR4. smokes Rothmans, has ER emblazoned on his blazer, and Pomades himself before bed. Imagine the taste of Summer of '42 Or The Last Picture Show, more light-hearted and transposed to the fleshly youth of Poitou, replace drive-ins and supermarts With hunks of bread, cheese and Pate; cows swaying with fecundity, the rough and ready good life of the French rus where the paterfamilias can break wind Without a blush and where everyone has a matter-of-fact attitude to bodily functions, and You should have a fairly accurate idea of what the picture is like. It IS directed in a commercial realist Style and the colour is beautiful; wheaty leafy rustic hues with a succulent steamy dampness in the vicinity of streams. Annie's giggle Which is intended to symbolise the implacable exuberance of discovering that one is extremely sexy not only irritates her father With its implication of insolence, Powerful forces beyond the control of the village carpenter, but also, rising to a cackle, begins to grate on the audience too after the first hour. Frederic, the mechanic who doesn't make it with her and goes into the Air Force, is the equivalent of the all-American boy Whose charm lies in his mumble. Coming out of the waves in flowered surfing shorts the scene could have been almost anywhere along America's West Coast. The film comes tremulously close to easy watching for its affection is sometimes sentimental and its humour rather arch but Annie gets her gun in the end and the aroma of intense adolescent sexuality fills the nostrils always.
Dead Cert, which seems to have been rooting for the title of movie of the week, is a disappointment. As a horse-racing thriller it is of course built around the Grand National and after The Charge Of The Light Brigade it is beyond doubt that Tony Richar,dson knows how to direct horses. One might therefore think he could have drawn something remarkable out of Judi Dench but he is less of an adept with people and despite attempts to create some kind of suspense as the cronies of the track scheme for love and success, it is the shots of 'the race!' which steal the show. The personalities have all the dimension of those found in soap operas on afternoon TV, the Plot does not justify its convolutions, and although the subject is tindoubtedly one with possibilities it is only when the animals start thudding about that it appears in any way real. I hope Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips enjoyed it at the premiere.
Previous page
