'Cinema
Dead thrills
Duncan Fallowell
The Black Windmill Director: Don Siegel Stars: Michael Caine, Donald Pleasance, Janet Suzma 'A' DTIpire, Leicester Square (106 min' utes).
La Bonne Armee Director: Claude Lelouch Stars: Francoise Fabian, Lino Ventura 'A' Odeon, St. Martin's Lane (112 minutes).
Bamboo Gods and Iron Men Director: Cirio Santiago Stars: ames Iglehart, Shirley Washing' ton, Chicquito 'X' Astoria and Nev..: Victoria (94 minutes) A little mystery for you tO ponder. Take two rich and successful US film producers, David Brown and Richard Zanuck, who even in these days of soya bean milk and loom-spun steak keep alive the modern mythology of Hollywood. awash in bank notes, for they have in their pocket a film called The Sting which did not exactly refuse to cough up. Add the talented and famous like Donald Pleasance who has done particularly well out or the fashionable revival of Gestapo parts, Michael Caine with the longest-running eyelashes in the business, and Janet Suzmari, — admit' tedly a lady who even pn the 0perscreen seems to have strayed out of the Play for TodaY, almost any one of them. Bring uP, the charismatic cinema name 0' Siegel (Don, actually), the maker of Dirty Harry and Coogan's Blug aIi you do not have to be a 4ievotee the paella western to acknovvledge competence and a flair for pace and grit. Throw in the kidnapPing, tendencies of the IRA because I think someone somewhere should derive some benefit from their activities even if it is only a Oil, company. Mix a spot of Channel hopping, an English country house and, eccentrically, a windmill near Brighton. Now, what have you got? A spine-twitching exercise in controlled terror, as announced sever a,! times a day on Capital Radin• Wrong. The Black Windmill is all M16 counter-spy fol-de-rol wh.icl' embodies a familiar but inexplica" ble paradox: how, having failed to grab in the first few sequences, Y°115 can then go on to lose your griP the reels roll relentlessly towaru,s the Exit and liberty. Last week. s The Conversation did one disservice to the contemporary thriller. It Was so thoroughly creepy that anythidg to follow on its heels in the genre is* going to have its work cut out no", to slip into the crowded ditch mediocrity. And if by extension thea. standards of mediocrity are tht!!, raised, then a film like Siegel's going to have its work cut ou's fighting for the ditch itself. But. au T. S. Eliot eventually realised, Y°0 cannot blame Milton for being t°_ good. The m5, stery remains. by,/ere did all the i -npetence go?
La Bonne Annefe, a love story about a robbery on the Cannes branch of Van Cleef and Arpels, is altogether a prettier picture. Just in case you should have forgotten that Lelouch was responsible for France's answer to The Sound of Music (playing opposite each other
at one time in the Tottenham Court Road), that is Un Homme et u.ne Femme, there are several satirical references to it in his new film, very self-congratulatory but neatly done. As usual there is the beautifully handled eating (Bertolucci corrotJs in for the references too) andr"Francoise Fabian who runs the gallery next to Cleef's is deliciously tart as the Woman with the most laid-back dinner parties in town. The actual robbery is almost as well-organised as the food and is seen in flashback after Ventura has done his time, so that it does not interfere too much With the amour. The title of Bamboo Gods and Iron Men is the most exciting thing about it. The director seems to have begun with the intention of making yet another Kung Fu thriller, realised that it was quite beyond his ,P0Wers, and decided that the best to De wrestled from the mess was a good old romp. Any episode of The Avengers, even in its last debilitated days, would give you more of a run for your money that this pottage of home movie ineptitude, although one has to admire the te.rrific gall of all concerned in imagining that they have any right whatsoever to be within a hundred miles of a studio, let alone swaninn. it
6 on location in Hong Kong,
`ne.Philippines and what looks like a d.isused air strip in Death Valley. With the death of Bruce Lee the short glor: of Kung Fu came to an end and in pictures like this you can hear mini-moguls with Bronx accents who never had • an original thought in their lives trying to milk
the last few dimes from a bone-dry Udder.
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