Cinema
fifteen love
Clilistopher Hudson
Jeremy ('A' ABC 1) is one of those charming films about first love With which the American film industry interleaves its unending iltelodrama of blood and vengeance to show that there is another side of the coin to all that v,iolence, and its name is sen
timentality
"mentality. Like a tender violet 1;0king up amid the spoils of war, ererny takes us back to those Years of palpitating adolescence vihen drugs were found at a nrugstore and a Saturday night !Pedal was a wet kiss in the back "rnm of the stalls. The story has all the freshness and originality you would expect. (Jeremy is a young lad of fifteen any older and he could be accused of immaturity) who attends expensive mixed school in New hOrk. His natural awkwardness ides a nature both modest and :iletermined; he is a good basket, all player and the best musician lin the school, thanks to his private s.essons with a wise old music `eacher in a beret. With girls he is 3,1-1Y, and apt to do disarmingly att'ractive things like push his specfeet.4eles up his nose and leer at his Collecting some chalk one day, ,r meets a pert young thing called 1,9San and falls mawkishly in love. s' takes her a bit longer, not PrPrisingly, and meanwhile fererny is practising a cello solo the school concert, a piece twritten in sadness and joy, as the aeacher tells him, giving the game by a composer still in his hs-ns on catching sight of a young ;easant girl whom he never saw bgin. The feeling isn't quite there,
technically Jeremy's all right, 'Id Susan's heart goes out to him 4s 4s
R, he sits sawing away on the i`ri4ge"After your concert I just thew anyone who could play like .rat Must be someone special." hen, the walks in the park, the Y morning excursion to see the
racehorses exercising, the shy kiss at the front door (she breathes, "Tonight was beautiful" — "You know what's beautiful? You're beautiful" he replies, pushing up the spectacles and leering at her feet), and finally the rainy afternoon when the chess set is put aside and true love is confessed, after which he wastes no time and the camera discreetly moves away while the music soars up and Jeremy's reedy voice on the soundtrack can be heard singing 'Don't Just Throw Your Love About.' Not a very appropriate message in the circumstances, but Jeremy's young yet. However the film is ninety minutes long and the course of true love has taken eighty-three minutes to be consummated. Tragedy has been waiting in the wings. Susan's father has to move back to Detroit, and Susan has to go with him. There is a tearful, agonised parting in the airport lounge and Jeremy reels away, the first lesson of his young manhood completed. We wait for him to go back to that cello solo with new feeling, reliving the joy and sadness of its composer; but mercifully the credits come up and we file out, handkerchiefs pressed to our eyes.
Sadly I have to say that The Satanic Rites of Dracula ('X' Rialto), a Hammer production directed by Alan Gibson, is a great disappointment. Despite the presence of Peter Cushing as Van Helsing and Christopher Lee as Count Dracula, not to mention a
'couple of stalwart character actors in supporting roles, Freddie Jones and William Franklyn, it has none of the intensity and absurd logic of the better British horror films. After a promising start with a ritual Black Mass attended by leading establishment figures, it dwindles into a poorly-handled unexciting story about Black Death bacteria in the hands of a large industrial corporation mysteriously run by the Count himself. The visual effects are paltry; the tension is nil.
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