Cinema
No Recriminations
By ISABEL QUIGLY Stars. (Hampstead Play- house.)—The Sins of Rachel Cade. (War- ner.) Yes, we know the facts, it is all too familiar for surprise or even, in the usual sense, shock. You cannot make an original war film by now, I mean a film about such things as this that will arouse new reactions. You can only intensify what has been felt already. How can you vary what is aroused by, say, the sight of children packed off to deaths as horrible as anyone ever imagined? But when, to take an example, Andre Schwarz-Bart describes a child calling: 'But Mummy! I was a good boy' as the gas Cyclon-B falls, then the intensity becomes almost too great to bear, the imaginative shift too terrible. Stars is a very restrained film. We see no immediate brutality, and even as the cattle trucks are filled the people get in at their own pace, the very young and the old helped up, even the doors slammed shut without violence. It is even a hope- ful film, for all the hopelessness of those people who cling to the dream of going to a work camp, planting cabbages, while we know they are bound for Auschwitz. And it says what wants saying, in a few words between the Jewish girl and the German soldier w ho grows to love her. He says: 'I didn't want this to happen.' She says: 'You did nothing to stop it.' That's all, no recrimina- tions, just enough. 'This mixed-up, queer, good man!' says the not very sophisticated subtitle; but the words (or their latter-day implications) don't matter much. You can see what she means.
The director's effects, like those of the script, are at once simple and subtle. Their immediate impact seems simple, but they linger; you feel the subtleties later. For example, when the film starts we see the German sergeant walking through a small Bulgarian town. It's market day, the stalls decked with produce, toys, knick-knacks; jolly country folk abound and even the ambulant Ger- mans look amiable, z as no doubt occupation troops often did. The sergeant picks a doll up off a stall, the sort of souvenir he might send home to a small sister, and holds it up for a look. Blank and pigtailed, amiable-looking as the Germans, it's a Jew-doll: a rag creature wearing the star and a number that's made to look tattooed across its chest. Later we see who makes them, a Jewish family in the village. And all through the film there is the same not exactly ambiguous but what you might call evasive, poetic realism; the horrors obliquely suggested, and more spiritual than physical. We see no beat- ings or torture, and the band of Greek Jews, though tired and terrified, at least look well enough fed; but in close-up we are shown the sadist's boot crunching their precious• medicines into the ground, over and over, while the jolly fat face above keeps smiling. We know the young people are never lovers, in the present-day sense of the word, and even their talk is halting and inadequate to express what they have to say to each other; but sometimes we see the girl, as she speaks, as if she were part of another life, a wider reality, in some of the loveliest super- imposition of images I remember. It is nothing as crude as flashback, just a kind of reflection of her effect on the man as she speaks, or per- haps of her own state of mind.
Stars is an East German/Bulgarian co-produc- tion and one of the most satisfying war films I have seen. What is it about our own war films, in the West? Why do they never seem to approach, not just this quality, but this degree of what seems (yes, whatever the present circum- stances and ideologies) like candour? Is it embarrassment?—I mean large-scale embarrass- ment, a mixture of present motives, retrospective guilt? I ask this, not to provoke more angry correspondence, but in real puzzlement.
With Stars, making this surely the best pro- gramme's-worth in London at the moment, is Franco Rossi's film about two schoolboys, Friends for Life (Amici per la Pelle), which the word unforgettable, so airily applied all too often, really fits.
Beside these two, The Sins of Rachel Cade (director : Gordon Douglas; 'A' certificate) is an excursion into spiritual Disneyland. Only one actress on earth could have made one believe in this missionary who has an illegitimate child in the African jungle—the one who brings vigour and reality to pretty well anything, and used to have a corner in missionaries, old maids and glorious, late-emerging ugly ducks: I mean, of course. Katherine Hepburn. But this Rachel is played by an ordinary young person of insuffer- able prissiness, and after two hours of her (Angie Dickinson) you're rolling your eyes like the local witch-doctor. Even Peter Finch, once again a crusty, atheistic, womanising Belgian, as in The Nun's Story (but there another Hepburn saved things), can do nothing to rescue it. It's almost a collector's piece—especially the music, which kicks you in the shins before you've even seen what's up. and helps to keep the old sex-and- religion seesaw pounding up and down till you're dizzy.
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