Cinema
Black comedy
Kenneth Robinson
Mending° Director: Richard Fleischer Stars: Perry King, Susan George, James Mason, Ken Morton 'X' Plaza One (140 mins.) I know you're all anxious to hear about the latest Japanese film. But that, if you'll forgive me, must wait until next week. I decided to give all my energies to Mending°. Partly because I thought its bashing by critics in America suggested it was worth quite a bit of space. And partly because the poster promised an unusual experience, enough to make fufther film-going this week too exhausting to contemplate.
'Expect the savage', says the poster. 'The sensual. The shocking. The sad. The powerful. The shameful. Expect all that the motion picture has never dared to show before.'
On reflection, I suppose that is all a bit of a give-away. When a film gets itself described as a motionpicture it is certain to be one degree worse than a movie. You expect it to be rubbish, however well-made. And that is what this small slice of Gone With The Wind turned out to be.
But what exactly is it that the film dares to show for the first time? I suppose the publicity boys mean the quite explicit scenes of white and blacks tangled up together in moments of high passion. These all take place in the days of slavery in the Deep South. A young white man (Perry King) falls in love with his young black plaything, largely because he suspects his wife of incest. The wife retaliates by horse-whipping the black girl, who promptly falls down a spiral staircase and has a miscarriage. Susan George does the horse-whipping scenes really beautifully and makes quite a good job' of seducing her husband's favourite black slave. This involves a lot of grimacing as she discovered, apparently,that it's quite true what they say about darkies. Miss George is less good at being poisoned in bed. But in this scene there are no ornaments to knock over, or tables I to bang on with little fists. Anyway, by now she has spent her acting energies in simulating giving birth to a black baby.
Her husband kills her immediately after the doctor has destroyed the baby. The husband then shoots the black father and is about to be slaughtered by a faithful old retainer
But no, let me say no more. The bloodbath finale is as boring as everything of its kind since Hamlet. The nicest thing
about it is that the cinema audience didn't believe in it at all. They laughed and cheered, not only at this point but in other scenes of violence. And they were quite convulsed when the white husband ditched his wife in favour of a black servant. So much so that I felt we get nearer every day to the first black-and-white bedroom farce on the London stage.
'Rubbish,' said the man next to me. As he was black I asked him why he thought so. 'Because,' he said, 'it's time all this old stuff was forgotten. It doesn't do any good to remember it'. I think he was wrong. What the film did, after all, was to get us both talking cheerfully about whites and blacks in a way that would not have been possible fifteen or twenty years ago. And however much we might have disliked all the blending of black and white flesh, we didn't find it revolting in itself. No more revolting, in fact, than this kind of thing always is in the cinema, when the skins are the same colour.
There is a lot that is inferior about this picture. But it keeps on climbing out of its sleaziness and melodrama and achieving a little dignity. The music is interesting. Not inspired, but certainly interesting in the way it is used, very obviously, to evoke atmosphere. Most of the time it is so noisily appropriate that the pictures are secondary to the sound. Except when an ersatz negro spiritual takes on a hint of 'Hark the Herald Angels Sing' and leads into a burst of jungle drums.
The director of this picture, Richard Fleischer, has been accused of exploiting his subject. 1 ,think this is the most hopeful thing about the film. When somebody is accused of exploiting a social problem it means, I'm sure, that the problem is not as great as it was, Fifteen years ago almost any film about blacks and white would have been treated with reverence by critics. The fact that they now feel 'free to attack means they find the subject less awe-inspiring today.
I don't recommend this as a great production. But I do think it it worth seeing as a sort of milestone, if that is the word I want, in the development of films about racial discrimination.
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