Cinema
Getting the rating right
Christopher Hudson
Scorpio ('X' Odeon, Leicester Square) is a silly film, with all the
ingredients that make silly films successful. To begin with, it is a spy film based on the unlikely premr that a senior CIA agent named Cross, who spends his spare time drinking with Zharkov his
Russian opposite number, is
talking about nothing except the old days when spies were gentlemen who trusted each other, Not unjustifiably, Cross's CIA boss gets worried, and frames a young colleague codenarned Scorpio, on a trumped-up narcotic's charge, to force him to hunt Cross down and dispatch him.
From here on in everything about Michael Winner's film is predictable, including the deliberate confusion of the story, Is Cross really a double-agent? Is Zharkov straight? Which way is Scorpio going to turn? To avoid revealing the shallow construction and to prolong the infinitesimal tensions of the plot, we are given almost no information, and have to make do with the usual chase sequences, a few picturesque deaths, some pleasant location shooting in Vienna where Cross and Zharkov exchange their no-staigic vodkas, and a magnificently unsurprisihg ending hack in Washington DC. All the old favourites appear like the lame, bearded Jewish musician who makes. an assignation with Cross at the Opera House and can't forbear reminding him that his unquestioning loyalty dates from Auschwitz days when Cross was the GI who brought him out. The mock-tough dialogue has its gems too: "I would offer you coffee, Cross, but the sugar would attract. flies."
The cast, fittingly, is international chic. Cross is given the honest, upright, lantern.jawed treatment by Burt Lancaster, who is surely getting a little old and overweight for roles like this. Paul Scofield drawls his way through the part of the Russian agent, and gives the impression of renouncing whatever character the part provides in order to concentrate on getting the right Eastern European inflections in his voice. And since Scorpio is called upon to be a young, vicious, unemotional foreigner, Alain Delon strolls through the part with the
same careless facility. Mostly he plays with cats, but as an expendable 'girlfriend he is given Gayle
Hunnicutt. She doesn't have much to say — and since in the acting stakes I class her with Raquel Welch and Candice Bergen, this is probably a good thing.
In fact Scorpio is a sound example of a film of .absolutely no
intrinsic value which will nevertheless reap profits at the hox-office. The only matter of local interest (and when Winner makes a film there is always something for the press to latch on to) is that the GLC reversed something for the press to latch Scotpio an 'A certificate. This is probably nearer the mark, for it is harmless enough fare, except perhaps for one moment when Burt Lancaster inserts his gun into somebody's mouth and makes him swallow a pill. But it can't help raising again the matter of the arbitrariness of censorship ratings. Does palpably unrealistic violence on screen deserve as strict a certificate as violence in a seriouslyintended film? Would the GLC have accepted the 'X' certificate if Miss Hunnicutt had appeared without her clothes on, instead of keeping the sheets decorously tucked around her and an expression of sweet concern on her face when the cops burst into the bedroom to beat up her lover Scorpio?
Certainly is seems absurd to award the same certificate nationally to Scorpio as to the only other film press-shown this week, Tango of Perversion ('X'). Set in Athens it features a rich, impotent youth who hides behind a double mirror in his bedroom with a film camera while his best friend takes girls to bed on the other side. He tries to rape a lesbian who has slept with his closest girl friend in return for a regular supply of heroin, and beats her to death in the process. The voyeur, we are led to suppose, makes love to the dead girl, and later to another whom he has strangled in his bathroom. He gets killed in the end, and the secret films convict the murderer: or so I believe, because I didn't stay to see the end. It is badly filmed, badly scripted, badly acted — and as a result less exciting or erotic even than the appalling plot might indicate. When a film like this gets released with the same certificate as Scorpio there is clearly something wrong.
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