CINEMA
Carry on filming
PENELOPE HOUSTON
Once Upon a Time in the West (ABC Edgware Road and Fulham Road, 'A') 'I he Bridge at Remagen (Odeon, Leicester Square. 'A') Lye of the Cat (Odeon, St Martin's Lane, 'X') We seem to have hit a sticky, jaded end of summer patch in the cinema, a time for listening to the clatter of dying formulas, falling as thickly as the corpses tumbling about the screen. But if one is stirred to think about the week's films—and it would be difficult to think very hard--it is about the way cinema works on the conditioned reflex. Unless the thing is really hopelessly bungled, there is still some kind of residual rightness in movie cliche, some carryover from association. perkips some surviving grace in performance. This week, you pays your money and you takes your choice: Eleanor Parker surrounded by cats; George Segal leading a notably neurotic platoon across the Remagen bridge; Henry Fonda squinting into haid Southern sunlight. All pretty nondescript, none entirely unwatch- able; and all most easily watched, as it happens, when they stick closest to the utterly conventional.
Fonda appears in Ottce Upon a Time in the West, the latest in those eccentric, hybrid.
Italian extensions of the Western legend. Since the Italians in any case see most of. their films dubbed. they have always been less pernickety than the rest of us about verbal improbability; and the dis- covery that the Western landscape isn't sacrosanct. being more or less repeatable in Europe, launched the whole fashion some years ago. Now that they can com- mand big American stars (Jason Robards and Charles Bronson this time, as well as Fonda). Sergio Leone's films certainly sound more like the real thing. But a curious, re- mote, alienated real thing all the same.
Leone crawls through his Westerns, like a fly-trekking over a window pane. His gun- men (Fonda very villainous, spitting out tobacco and shooting the women and children last: Bronson on the side of justice. or vengeance, or at least of stranded widow Claudia Cardinale) glower and stalk and endlessly out-wait each other. But although Leone made his name by killing more people more slowly in his films than any other Western director, part of this linger- ing and rather frozen style obviously derives from a strength of affection for the whole Western idea. He can't bear, one sus- pects, not to loiter over that scene where the girl about to be shot is standing in- nocently outside the homestead, wearing white and humming one of the traditional songs; or to speed up the slow march of the bandits in those long, sinister, dangling dust-coats. The American Western still comes naturally; Leone's films have the somnambulant quality of a slow walk through someone else's dream landscape.
The Bridge of Remagen brings yet an- other incident from the late war into line with current movie philosophy; war is hell, but let's blow (or save) the bridge anyway. Truculent, mutinous, loot-hungry Gis are thrust into action by madly twitching, glory- hungry officers; honest, battle-weary Ger- mans, about to be shot down by ss firing- squads, raise their eyes to heaven and ask 'Who is the enemy?' The complacency of disillusionment has become almost indis- tinguishable from the old complacency of blood and thunder, and certainly no more appealing. John Guillermin directs this example, Robert Vaughn and George Segal play it out like professionals, and the cameraman Stanley Cortez (once of The Magnificent Ambersons) manages rather against the odds to give it something of a visual style. But it is an odd, unwanted irony to remember that this bit of simu- lated, rule-book war is the film they were shooting in Czechoslovakia last year when the Russian tanks came in.
In Eye of the Cat, murder is again a private, if moderately absurd affair. The in- tended victim is a rich, ailing San Francisco lady (Eleanor Parker), living pompously in a house dripping with chandeliers and cats, and rather aimlessly threatened by her hair- dresser (Gayle Hunnicutt) and a prankish nephew (Michael Sarrazin) who goes stiff with terror at the sound of a distant purr. Anyone who shares this particular phobia might well find Eye of the Cat more than tolerably alarming, since Miss Parker's pussies are presented as unequivoc- ally carnivorous. But if the idea was to attempt a kind of feline version of The Birds (the script is by Joseph Stefano. who scripted Psycho) it founders somewhere along the way, partly because the intima- tions of horror are mostly blood-stained, partly because neither David Lowell Rich's movie nor its characters can keep their minds for long enough on the job in hand. It is a silly sign of the times that even a mildly horrific and entertaining thriller, which a few years ago would have had a surer eye for the possibilities of the wheel- chair, the oxygen tent and the cat-infested cellar, now wastes its time footling off into the same old nude scenes and drug parties.
Thank heaven, certainly, for Buster. The Keaton season at the National Film Theatre, of recent and spectacular memory, has returned temporarily to Academy One. No one who has seen only extracts, or tele- vision snippets, has really seen Buster Keaton. In snatches, he is irresistibly grave and comical; but the essence of his jokes, his performances, the whole quality of his films, is structure: an extraordinary, un- failing sense of comic grace and propor- tion. As well as the better-known features— The General, Our Hospitality, Seven Chances—there is on view a twenty-minute film, The Boat, which must be one of the saddest, funniest and most perfect things ever put on celluloid.
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