Cinema

Plaster-casts

Kenneth Robinson

Killer Elite Director: Sam Peckinpah Stars: James Caan, Robert Duvall 'X' Dominion (123 mins).

Man Friday Director: Jack Gold Stars: Peter O'Toole, Richard Rountree 'A' Carlton (108 mins).

James Caan is in the private protection business in San Francisco. This means we get some good car chases along the switchback roads and some gorgeous shots of that spectacular bridge. One of the scenes, shot on high ground beside the river, fills the wide screen with a marvellous background pattern of bridge-struts, brought forward by the close-up lens. In other scenes Mr Caan is shown, in aerial views, either driving over the bridge or sailing beneath it.

Between the driving and the sailing sequences he has been crippled for life by a colleague shooting him in the knee and elbow. He is naturally displeased about this, as he waves his plaster-casts in frustration. Once we have watched every detail of his rehabilitation, including stitch-removal, kung-fu therapy and the attentions of a friendly nurse, he is ready for revenge.

I shall not sort out for you the rather harsh message of the picture, which is something about nobody caring about anybody these days, and heroism being outmoded. This is a film to relish, if you do relish such things, for its mixture of gun-blasts and oriental hand-fighting, with bodies falling from a great height in slow motion.

I think we shall soon be tired of these slow-motion deaths, the latest cliché of the cinema. It may well be time to speed everything up, in the manner of the silent film. With that approach we could have more extensive blood-baths much more quickly, and get home earlier for supper.

What I enjoy most in a film that is completely unbelievable are the moments of tension. These become amusing rather than horrifying. As when a policeman is given a time-bomb to hold. Will he throw it and kill somebody ? Or will he hang on to it and be blown to pieces ? Just as you've decided that you don't really care, the director takes you away from the scene altogether, and you're not quite sure if you are meant to hear a distant explosion or not.

If Killer Elite has some pretty depressing things to say about mankind, so does Man Friday. Peter O'Toole's Robinson Crusoe is English in all the worst ways and his Man Friday (Richard Rountree) leads him on, in his dreadful preachings and teachings, while hoping, at the same time, that he himself is educating the white man. At the end a humbled Crusoe wants to join the black man's tribe, but is rejected with contempt.

Adrian Mitchell has written the script that Bernard Shaw overlooked. It is a very funny idea and I kept wondering, as Crusoe and Friday whisked through religion, capitalism, sex and so on, exactly why the film was not truly Shavian. There is a lot of dialogue Shaw would not have been ashamed of. I particularly like Man Friday's confusion about whether a race should be run for winning or only for the sake of running it well. Crusoe concedes that winning can be important, unless you have been to a certain type of school. This bit really is pure Shaw. I think Adrian Mitchell has been unfairly criticised for dialogue which would have seemed uproarious on the London stage in the 1930s.

The trouble is we are now ready for some mockery of an entirely different type of Englishman. The colonial character, full of puritanism and crusading zeal, should be replaced by the ludicrous New Moralist. Can't you imagine scenes featuring an Englishman with the flabby moralising of a Mary Stott? Only the other day that extraordinary woman wrote in her Guardian column that clergymen's wives now accept that their own sons and daughters may have 'relationships' before marriage. I should love to hear a white New Moralist explain the revised facts of life to a black missionary.

In the meantime let us not, for goodness sake, underrate this sly essay in black power. I enjoyed it just as much as I did being struck by a black waitress in New York's Waldorf Astoria, for presuming to reach out for a bread roll without asking. It's nice for everyone to be put in his proper place occasionally.

Let me add that no variations on Daniel Defoe could ever make up for one charming line in the original, when Crusoe decides, as you may remember, to 'let the day invent itself'. ledge of his career and saw the ceiling he completed in 1973, which inspired most of the work in this show. Since the ceiling is in a private house in Scotland, that's a tall order, but for those who missed his retrospective at the Tate in 1971, here are some details of the career.

Brought up in Edinburgh and born of Italian parents his taste was always citified and catholic, totally detached from the prim attitudes current in art schools at the time. As a student in London just after the War he admired Surrealism and on leaving the Slade he went to Paris to seek out its practitioners. He particularly liked the collage effects of Duchamp, Ernst and Dubuffet. Collage has allowed artists to get at the world direct and spontaneously. Through its juxtapositions it can also reveal odd similarities, and an unpremeditated symbolism. This is inherent to a lot of 'objects' not normally considered works of art, and Paolozzi's work as an artist has been a continuous attempt to collage industrial/technological components peculiar to our twentieth-century existence into metaphors of modern life.

In his Tate show the artist, true to surrealist principles, cocked a snook at the fashionable Lord Snooty attitudes of the art world. He had been classified as a 'pop' artist. He preferred to be a 'Bash' artist. Instead of Warholian Brillo boxes he stacked bombs: an un-`pop'-ular image. The ceiling and tapestry at Cleish have a quieter authority about them. They are his best work to date and show how disgracefully his talent for applied art has been neglected here over the years. Because Paolozzi is, supremely, an energetic solver of problems, mover around, fitter together, permutator. A collagist. That's really what the show at Marlborough is all about. Maps—the layered contours are quite intentional—of modern association, their rhythms often inspired by music, as the Cleish ceiling was by a 'twenties painting in which an American artist had tried to express the sound of organ music, sectionally permutated in various relationships and applied to various media. Those who have a say in such matters as public commissions and an equal interest in the common wealth should visit Cleish, on expenses or off them, immediately.

Tom Phillips (Serpentine till Feb 29) should go back to first principles, in his case plasticine. Then there may be some progress. At present a bubble reputation seems to have turned his head. The triviality of his intellectual concerns is not disguised by references to Anglo-Saxon literature, Merleau Ponty, The Minerva Britannica of Peacham, Brahms's German Requiem op. 45, Wittgenstein, etc. The only fresh, untrendy, gleam of hope in his work is an obvious delight in those striped blocks of plasticine. Meanwhile anyone in an official capacity who is guilty of having puffed his reputation to bursting point should desist in the man's own interests, and their own.