Cinema
Empire State (`18', Cannons Haymarket & Oxford St) The Whistle Blower (PG', Odeon Haymarket)
Sleaze and freeze
Hilary Mantel
Ron Peck's Empire State is a film about greedy people, most of them sub- literate, who carve each other up in the East End of London. Occasionally, the script reveals its pretensions to be some- thing more.
The premise is charming, in itself. The Empire State is a night-club, and at the end of the day all the characters whose lives we have been following will gather there, and the thread of their adventures will be drawn together; rather like Mrs Ogden and Curly, down at the Rover's Return. And what adventures they are! Billy is a profes- sional boxer who gets beaten to a pulp. Cheryl is planning a bank job. Danny drives a cab and 'needs a grand, fast' anything illegal considered. Johnny is a rent-boy. Pete comes off the train from Newcastle, eager and expectant, like all young northerners. Will he enter a mer- chant bank? No: he will become a rent- boy too. Marion is a typist who goes on blind dates. Chuck is an American bisexual billionaire. He is considering putting his money into dockland redevelopment. The characters have one thing in common. They are all `fackin' desperate'.
After Chuck has walked about London, and paid Johnny to beat him up, he decides not to invest his money after all. 'Soon there'll be five or six million people out of work, running riot — what sort of a government's that going to throw up?' He flies back to his wife in the USA, thus disappointing the nasty consortium of yup- pies and toughies who were betting on the venture.
The walls of the Empire State are painted black. There are frequently fires there, and dead bodies in the lavatories. There is nothing to be said for it as an evening out, except that the price of drink doesn't seem to be excessive. The crowd inside look like the ones the doorman turns away in the well-known Levis advertise- ment. 'What's going on?' people ask each other, 'I wish I knew.'
The structure of the film is episodic, which means that the director could not fit it together, and there is no need for you to try. Its style alternates between film noir and pop video, sleaze and freeze. A noisy score builds up an atmosphere of rather pointless menace. In the climactic scene two bare-knuckle fighters pound each other to bits without any hindrance from what they would describe as fackin' Queensberry Rules. Soon afterwards, Danny goes berserk with a pump-action shotgun. A lot of people are dead. But as someone said ominously, 'There's always next Friday.'
Empire State reminds us what a harsh place Mrs Thatcher's Britain is, and makes us think fondly of the old East End traditions; sweatshops, fascism, Jack the Ripper. The Whistle Blower is nostalgic for a different era; the days when nuclear stalemate guaranteed the peace. Now, according to one of the GCHQ staff in the film, 'Nuclear war's a certainty . . . it's just the timing and extent.'
Michael Caine plays Frank Jones, a self-made businessman, a Korean war veteran. His son Bob (Nigel Havers) works for GCHQ as a Russian language trans- lator. Bob dies suddenly — it is put down as accident or suicide — and his father's investigations lead him to believe that he has been murdered, and that his own government has connived at it. Frank's search for 'an England I can believe in again' is not crowned by success. The trouble with spy films is that the characters never seem to have read the works of John Le Cant or Len Deighton; so they are utterly astonished by events, and bring out their hackneyed phrases as If they were new-minted that morning. Cinema-goers are wiser; they have a high prediction factor. The conjunction of Gor- don Jackson, Michael Caine and James Fox can only mean that Albion is being perfidious again; and a glance at Michael Caine's raincoat tells us that we have been here before, and puts us in a rising Panic that, just like last time, we'll miss the vital bit of the plot. In fact, if you keep your eye on sartorial matters you won't go far wrong. A Russian agent wears a little red flag in his lapel. Sir John Gielgud's carelessly knotted silk scarf proclaims him a traitor since his 'varsity days. Nigel Havers must wrestle wall, layers of woolly cardigans and scarves, and spectacles held together with sticking plas- ter, to show us — the script isn't up to it that he is an intellectual.
Michael Caine is very good, and the film is workmanlike; but it has no real bite. Like other films in the genre, the more it strives for realism, the more glossy and remote it seems, the more actorish the, actors; and the less plausible, viewed through the distortions of fiction, become the much stranger facts.
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