ARTS Battles long ago
PENELOPE HOUSTON
The Battle of Britain seems during the past week to have become the absolutely in- escapable headline subject, edging its way up towards Ulster, Edward Kennedy, the French strikes, and the rest of the day-to- day serial. A month ago, the average non- combatant newspaper reader could be allowed a certain haziness about the date of Lord Dowding's departure from Fighter Command, or 'big wing' tactics and their advocacy. Now we come to the Battle of Britain film (Dominion, `U') alarmingly well-briefed; alarmingly, because this is, after all, only the twenty-ninth anniversary, perhaps just a dress-rehearsal for the ad- vancing thirtieth. Still, we now have the film behind us; and one more respectable, dimly decent, not very elucidatory record goes into movie history.
It could hardly really be otherwise. Here's the good, brave cause, perhaps—but with an emotional defusing inevitable if you show a proper deference to the 1969 West German movie market. Here, with about five million pounds of production invest- ment riding on its back, is the unfashion- ably heroic engagement, resuscitated for the profoundly anti-heroic audience which is queuing for Peter Fonda's Captain America or Dustin Hoffman's Ratso Rizzo. Part of the advance fascination of the enterprise was whether Harry Saltzman, the producer who gauged the time so right for James Bond, would conjecture that flags were being waved again this year. On balance, he seems to have decided other- wise: that a controlled, rather circumspect, emphatically historical film was the order of the day.
That, anyhow, is what the director, Guy Hamilton, has brought smartly to the screen: a fair popularisation of fact, told in a chip-chop style that hops from fighter station, to that unchanging ops room where wAAFs push bits of carboard about maps like croupiers in some eternal casino, to German HQ Oh air invasion coast or Cockneys bedding down with loyal cheers in the tube shelters. Celebrated screen faces are everywhere: Trevor Howard and Kenneth More, who in the films of the *fifties were flying the planes, now pro- moted; languid Michael Caine and tight- jawed Robert Shaw up in the air. The script, by the late James Kennaway and Wilfred Greatorex, barely constructs character: it is for the players to impose the kind of mystic presence that goes with a flash of Sir Ralph or Sir Michael pour- ing tea or shuffling papers. Almost the only opportunity of any substance goes to Laurence Olivier's Dowding: and, of course, it is seized beautifully—melancholy, stiffened, bottled-up, but chkeau-bottled.
But the essential emphasis of this curiously impersonal film is less on the elusive mood of the times, the whole lost inconography of the 'forties, than on plain action: Spit- fire meets Heinkel. And here, I rather suspect inevitably, it runs into the hazard that however bold and devoted the recon- struction, aerial combat develops a rather intense visual monotony. The first engage- ments are fine: the dash away from the
French airfields, or the early raid3, with zooming aircraft shot through the filigree of a radar station. But there's a progressive flattening as it continues: no vital lift to the film, but a steady series of doomed spins.
Undoubtedly, Mr Saltzman's touch is at work; noticeably, as in the Bond films, in an engagingly extravagant concern for the pomp and circumstance of a set perhaps glimpsed on the screen for all of half-a- minute. The production team of Saltzman and Fisz have certainly laboured for their finest hour. But those discreet red, white and blue credit titles open the door on one of the year's more intriguing indicators of tastes and moods. Outside of Britain, or outside of nostalgia, how much charisma is there left in a Spitfire?
Ten Thousand Suns (Academy One, 'A') is going to sound forbidding: some thirty years of Hungarian history, viewed from the peasant grass-roots, covering the stretch from a feudal economy, with human labour bought and sold in cattle-market despair, to the land share-out after 1945 and the arduous routes towards collectivisation. Tractor and cream-separator notions die hard, so one ought perhaps to emphasise that there is almost nothing here of either tracts or tractors, and that one hardly needs even a cursory interest in Hungary's rural economy to find Ferenc Kdsa's film absorbing.
Its hero is a small, sullen peasant, with the face of a mutinous weasel, for whom the land is all: he would rather kill himself than give up an inch of his stubborn proprietorship. But in the 1960s the old peasant woman, who remembers that she once had a day out by the seaside, keeps the Tv set alongside the ancient stove, with jet planes plunging across a television sky. K6sa is fascinated by the sceptical same- ness of his people, and the barely perceptible processes that work on them. His setting, familiar from Miklos Jancsd's films, is the bare, wide-open Hungarian plain; and like Jancs6, though to less ominous effect, he develops his story through ellipses and side- slips, an austere setting of shuffling, tenta- tive human groups in landscapes of im- placable frozen force and strangeness.
Sometimes the settings begin to look almost surrealist. Bicycles lie all over the ground or dangle bafflingly from the trees; a mother out in the fields dumps her child in a hole and starts packing earth round him, as though planting him for the summer. Perhaps this is only a peasant play-pen? But the fact than one doesn't always know where ordinary country custom stops and symbolism begins adds, if anything, to the effect. For the peasants, communism is 'a dream, perhaps a future'; and in the film's whole mood there is a suggestion of dream, a conscious remoteness, a sense of the impenetrable village with its own sub- terranean processes. Ten Thousand Suns is often marvellous to look at, and strikingly open in its conclusions. It has found a relationship to its subject which never tries to impose an artificial intimacy.
Targets, (ABc Edgware Road and Fulham Road, 'X'), a first film by an American film journalist, Peter Bogdanovich, is well worth seeking out as it goes the rounds in tandem with Goodbye, Columbus. Notionally, it is a slightly wobbly and movie-theoretical attempt to make a connection (what con- nection Bogdanovich hasn't perhaps quite worked out) between the formularised, old- world horror of the cinema screen and the blank-faced, mindless horror of the sniper in the streets. Boris Karloff plays, with unfailing and touching presence, the aged and uncertain horror film actor; Tim O'Kelly is the suburban boy, a kind of good-child killer not entirely unlike the murderer in Psycho, who guns down his family and after mopping up the blood goes out to sit by the freeway and take shots at cars. The final sequences, with the sniper at large in a Californian drive-in cinema, are a notably cool, unhysterical contribution to the screen's literature of trepidation: the rows of cars, little private islands of vulner- ability, the mad gunman behind the screen, and the slow spread of panic through an audience whose first impulse—they are, after all, living in the slide area—is not to call for help but to break, almost stealthily, for the half-safety of cars and homes. Bogdanovich has pinned down one of the real American nightmares.
And for a fictional joke-nightmare, the first half of What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? (Odeon, Kensington, 'A') does quite well. Directed by Lee H. Katzin under the producer's eye of Robert Aldrich (Baby Jane, etc.) it's quite an amusing bit of lacy sham-gothic about a widow who, to main- tain the rather ornate style she's accustomed to (Grand Marnier and pheasant), bludgeons a series of lady companions and plants them under the garden pines. The film slides slowly into tedium, but Geraldine Page and Ruth Gordon have a high old time as mad murderess and amateur investigator; and Mildred Dunnock shakes a splendidly irate duster before her altogether too rapid departure for the pine grove.
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