CINEMA
Happiness is a warm bed pan
CHRISTOPHER HUDSON
For the two lovers, brevity is the soul of witlessness. Dialogue is on the lines of 'holy shit! ', 'bullshit!' and 'don't bullshit me', which shows that these brave people in a tragic situation don't need rhetoric to express the depth of their suffering. The heroine, in hospital (I won't go into the story: if you don't know it, count yourself lucky) says of her leukaemia at one point, 'it's like falling off a cliff in slow motion', and we know just what she means. The whole thing offers the same maudlin delight in anticipating disaster: if you have tears, prepare to shed them exactly ninety-five minutes after the start. But unlike Marjorie Proops, whose glasses must have misted up, when I looked round the audience I saw no weeping multitudes, only a few embarrassed grins at the shaming triteness of it all. "
Another cheap film—though probably ex- pensive to make, as cheap films usually are—is Get Carter ('x', ABc2). Michael Caine is Carter, a racketeer who travels up to Newcastle to avenge the death of his brother and the prostitution of his niece. As a routine thriller, directed fast and pro- fessionally by Mike Hodges, it provides routine thrills, but in a peculiarly dehumanising way. The real star is the telescopic rifle which finally wins out over karate chops, injections, drownings, pistol- lings, knifings, a gun butt, and pushing off a high walkway; and Carter is the hero simply because he handles most of the weapons, and most of the girls. The bad thing about the film is that it tries to be naturalistic without dropping the James Bond fantasy that Carter has to be witty and charming, cool and gentlemanly, even if his family loyalties mean getting an innocent boy mutilated, an innocent girl crushed in a car by the body he's thrown down on it, and another girl crushed in the boot of a car. All in the name of good entertainment, or, I should rather say, good box office. After these it is refreshing to turn to two films which don't insult their audience. Bartleby ('A', Essoldo, Maida Vale) is based on a short story by Herman Melville about a young man who completely withdraws from life. In this adaptation by Anthony Fried- mann, who also directs, Bartleby is an audit clerk working under an accountant in a faceless London office block. Very civilly he declines first to work, then to leave the building, and finally to give any answer at all to the accountant's bewildered ques- tioning.
The acting is excellent. Paul Scofield takes the part of the accountant, quavering his oboe voice in tones of growing worry and disbelief. John McEnery as Bartleby manages to give a convincing portrayal of a totally negative human being without forfeiting for a moment our interest and at- tention. He irons out any trace of character or idiosyncrasy. His voice keeps a steady monotone against Scofield's range, except for one moment when he shouts 'I want to be alone!' Bartleby ought to be a totally unsympathetic figure as he metamorphoses into an object, a man without qualities; but the camera is on his side. There is no protest; only the facts of computerised numbers, high-rise office blocks, anonymous crowds, things thrown away, and the Post Office's dead letter department where he used to work, handling letters that can't be forwarded and can't be returned to source.
In Five Easy Pieces ('AA', Prince Charles) Jack Nicholson, last seen here in Easy Rider, plays a drop-out, Bobby Dupea, who withdraws from society in rather more con- ventional ways. It is one of the best of the long line of American films on the Kerouac trail: about moving on, as Dupea says, 'get- ting away from things that get bad if I stay', about the difficulty of finding standards and inner security without the outer trap- pings—house, family, career. Dupea has plenty of money and nothing he wants to spend it on; plenty of work and nothing to direct it towards; plenty of women and none he wants a settled relationship with. He comes back, with a girlfriend, to the quiet family house on an island off the Washington coast, and finds a girl there (Susan Anspach) engaged to his crippled elder brother. For once, the position is reversed. He wants love from her, she wants sex from him but nothing more. She will marry into security, quietness, peace of mind.
At the end, it is escapism. The girlfriend is Left behind, Dupea hitches on, northwards, to anywhere. But the film, unusually, has dialogue that sounds fresh and honest, and spells out the problems unpretentiously. Jack Nicholson's performance has a genuine. depth and feeling to it, and Karen Black is hilarious as the dumb waitress girlfriend. Not surprisingly, the film has had a con- siderable success in the States, and there's every reason why it should do as well here.
The other films can be dismissed very rapidly. Lawman (`AA', London Pavilion) produced, directed and publicised by Michael Winner, is a capably-made but uninspired Western with Burt Lancaster as a tough sheriff, Richard Ryan as a weak sheriff, and Lee J. Cobb as 'a ponderously reflective ranch-owner. It doesn't ring true, any more than When Eight Bells Toll, a ludi- crous and banal Alastair Maclean story, told with the same kind of, Swallows and Ama- zons adventuresomeness as Where Eagles Dare, the last ludicrous and banal Alastair Maclean story. This one is helped more than it deserves by Robert Morley as a blimpish Chief of Intelligence, Anthony Hopkins as the kill-it-yourself handyman, and Nathalie Delon who helps anything along. The Priest's Wife ('A', Warner West End) is an Italian film about celibacy in the Catholic Church, which doesn't know whether to dare to be funny or dare to be serious, and ends by succeeding on neither level. Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren do the best they can with it.
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