CINEMA
Sugar baddy
CHRISTOPHER HUDSON
It is a cruel stroke of fate when a director's leading star manages almost single-handed to ruin his productiont Gillo Pontecorvo who directed Queimada! ('AA' Columbia) must have thought wistfully of his Battle of Algiers, recently to be seen at The Other Cinema,
which so successfully emplOyed amateur actors to show the ordinariness and terror of revolution.
Queimada! is also about revolution, but there the similarities end. Marlon Brando, who long since left the waterfront for a house in the hills, plays the part of Sir William Walker, a nineteenth-century English nobleman employed by the Government to wrest control of a West Indies sugar- producing island from the Portuguese. He incites a revolt of the slaves, led by one Jose Dolores, persuades the Portuguese mer- chants to join it in their own interests, and leaves after the island has been made inde- pendent in name, and in practice ceded to the control of a British sugar company. Ten years later he returns, to crush a new revolt led by Dolores. He is using Walker's own tactics to fight perfidious Albion which has freed the slaves only to bind them the more securely to processing the island's economy.
The film starts off promisingly with blood- red credits splashed across pictures of the labouring hordes and stirring, martial music by Ennio Moricone, but it loses all its impetus when Brando appears. It is an aston- ishing performance for him. He is .wooden,. extremely mannered, and wholly unconvinc- ing. He speaks his lines with what is supposed to be cynical detachment and emerges as colossal disinterest. He is at his best when looking into a mirror, which he does frequently, and at his worst when called on to portray indecision, fear, delight, pain or any other emotion which requires an expression to pass across the face. True enough, the dialogue is impossibly stilted and the pace tortoisely slow; but it is easy to understand how Pontecorvo felt the story was a good one, and how Brando, on his old form, might have made an interesting film of it. As it is, any search for significance has to fall back on the topicality of Carib- bean sugar.
Ice ('x' The Other Cinema) is another totally serious film about revolution which defeats its own intentions. Made by Stanley Kramer and based on a group of young activists, it covers much the same ground as The Revolutionary in an even more diffuse and inarticulate way. The aims of these revolutionaries are never properly explained to us: but the film attempts to solve this dialectical difficulty by staging the conflict in the indefinite future, in an America so brutal and fascist that words are irrelevant and the deed speaks for itself. There is nothing unusual about this. Quite gentle Americans seem to enjoy imagining a future in which the tactics of the Weathermen will be morally justifiable, and one should not deny them the right to anticipate it For all that, the talk of regional groups and hide- aways and secret files can't help sounding like the old, bourgeois thrillers—until we are brought stiffly to attention by grainy texts flashing on to the screen about the sanctity of the Revolution. Ice has a mes- sage, there is no doubt of it. With a few ideas, a dash of humour and a good deal of editing, it might have got across.
The other two films this week are even worse, and have no excuses either. The Baby Maker ('AA' tow, Fulham Road and Edgware Road) tells the breathless story of a beautiful girl (Barbara Hershey) who makes a baby for a childless couple. The dialogue and direction, both by James Bridges, are moder- ately good; but the set-up is as artificial as it could be. The couple are rich, middle-class Americans who live in Beverly Hills; and she is a poor, carefree hippy who lives in a Californian beach pad with a guitar-strum- ming head. After various kinds of give and take on both sides, she naturally falls for the husband, leaves her man, and so forth. Not worth one of John Russell Taylor's regulation four handkerchiefs. la, la, Mein General ('u' Warner West End) is an unamusing and tedious farce produced, directed and per- formed by Jerry Lewis, who is no longer as funny as he thinks he is,
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