El Dorado (Plaza, 'U')

CINEMA

No flies on Hawks

PENELOPE HOUSTON

El Dorado (Plaza, 'U') Kwaidan (Cameo-Poly, 'X') The Sailor from Gibraltar (London Pavilion, 'X') `Faith can move mountains, but it can't beat a faster draw,' says one of the lazily profes- sional gunfighters in Howard Hawks's El Dorado. People have been saying things like this to each other in Hawks's movies for just on forty years; and on the evidence of his enormously genial new Western, it's by no means time yet for a change. It's easy, cer- tainly, to deride the Hawksian world, that Hollywood outpost of Hemingway country where men are men (but preferably also pilots, big-game hunters, racing motorists, private eyes or gunslingers), girls can join the boys' games if they promise not to cry or sneak, and a sense of professional obligation stirs blearily in everyone from wizened old-timer to spry greenhorn. But for all its eternal fourth form verities, it's not a studio mock-up but a world that it's possible to move around in. The wood- work creaks, the lamps hang low over the green baize tables; in the saloon the gunmen are playing poker, arid the young stranger in the comical hat walks in out of the night to settle accounts for a murder.

This scene, perhaps the best in the film, bears all the Hawksian fingerprints: laconic, easy dialogue !the writer of this sturdy. funny script, Leigh Brackett, is apparently a woman), hair-trigger action, but a pause for deliberation while the veteran gunfighters devote a con- noisseur's attention to the problem of how the novice expects to beat a faster draw. John Wayne, like some towering western nanny keeping the peace between warring children, takes the young man who can't shoot (James Caan) under his wing. And so the film jog- trots on, to a near-replica of Hawks's classic Rio Bravo, with the sheriff and aides trying to hold a prisoner in the town jail and the bad men in command of the streets.

Age doesn't stale the Western theme: in these circumstances, the more familiar, in fact, the better. Robert Mitchum's sheriff, recovering from months of straight drinking and tottering about his township like a somnambulant scare- crow, has to be drastically sobered up before the shooting starts. There's a shambling deputy (Arthur Hunnicutt, in what one can think of only in a Hawks film as the Walter Brennan role) to keep prattling aimlessly and heating up the coffee; and staunch Maudie (Charlene Holt), owner of the Broken Heart saloon, to bring baskets of goodies through the siege lines. When the old crocks--Mitchum on crutches, Wayne with a paralysed gun hand—trundle off in their wagons for the final showdown with the enemy Can unfriendly bunch of people,' Wayne calls them), Hawks knows better than to try for a sentimental-heroic gesture. The image of relaxed, battered professionalism guarantees success, particularly against a gun- man too courteous to shoot first.

Even as present-day Westerns go, El Dt»ado is distinctly on the elderly side; but it capi- talises superbly on the feeling that almost every- one around has been there before. Wayne and Mitchum ride their parts as they now do their horses—a bit of an effort to get up, but once in the saddle as safe as houses. When they all bestir themselves to an action scene it remains impressively swift and implacable—gunfighters stalking dark streets; church bells clanging to the ricochet of bullet; a piano player with a gun trained on him wondering if this time they really will shoot the pianist. But the pleasures of El Dorado are essentially good- tempered and reminiscent: Hawks's West, last of the pre-Freudian territories.

The three ghost stories that make up Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan are by Lafcadio Hearn, a writer I somehow associate—on the most im- precise evidence—with a rather wispy brand of orientalism. But certainly there's no syn- thetic cherry blossom about Kwaidan, a film of severe, precise, beautiful and occasionally unnerving imagery. The first of the three stories is the shrewdest. A young samurai, greedy for

advancement. diN orces his loyal and loving wife for a rich. unhappy marriage. He's bored:. the

rich wife in her stiff silks is bored. Back creep the insistent memories: into the soundtrack break the dry click and rattle of the loom where the forsaken wife sat eternally weaving. lie rushes back, to desolation, rotting floor- boards, a house sliding hack into the forest-- and a loving welcome. Next morning, there's a skeleton beside him.

Few ghost stories are original, and this one less so than most. What makes it striking is the spare, deliberate, almost mathematical way Kobayashi springs his trap. In a dazzling green kimono, remote and untouchable, the new wife stands in a forest clearing; crossly, her husband hacks his way ~awards her through a green sea of bracken. The feeling is of a dream, from which he must return to the past; and the past is now illusion—first of forgiveness, then the nightmare of pursuit by the death's head with the trailing black hair.

Similarly calm and insidious, the second story is a teasing fragment about a man who sees a smiling, spectral face gazing up from the depths of his tea-cup--and petulantly gulps down both tea and ghost. The third, and longest, concerns a blind novice monk who is called out every night to play and recite to a phantom company, the dead of a great medi- aeval sea battle. Again, in this wry and ferocious story, Kobayashi works by contrast: monastic sloth, with two twittering servants and a smug, know-all abbot, set against the wildness of the doomed fleet, all tattered banners, barges

drifting through mist, and the court ladies of the- defeated clan making slow-motion suicide

leaps into a blood-red sea. Kwaidan's solemnity of pace calls for patience; its rewards, inter- mittent but lingering, are its awareness of what make a legend.

One emerges from The Sailor from Gibraltar with a slight sense of stupefaction. Has one really been watching Jeanne Moreau, in full safari rig, offering a filter-tip cigarette to a six-foot African tribeswoman; Orson Welles in a squashy fez, announcing himself in a defiant mumble as Louis from Mozambique; Ian Bannen declaring glumly that it's all rather like being in a m000vie--the 'o' so drawn-out that it sounds like a plaintive lament for the movie he happens to be in?

After Mademoiselle (Genet and Jeanne Moreau) perhaps Tony Richardson shows a certain courage in trying again, with the same sort of far-out subject and the same dogged literalness of approach. The literacy credentials remain redoubtable: a novel by Marguerite Duras; Isherwood on the script. And as long as Vanessa Redgrave is on screen, playing a chatterbox English girl fighting with steely optimism and an ever-open guidebook to have her Italian holiday, all is not quite lost. Too soon, her dour companion (Ian Barmen) packs her off home and embarks on the high seas with a millionairess (Jeanne Moreau) cruising the Mediterranean in search of the mythical sailor, ideal lover and innocent murderer, whom she has somehow or somewhere mislaid.

From the bizarre to the absurd is only a step, and once its well and -truly taken not

even Jeanne Moreau, in her disenchanted- sphinx mood, can do more than cling to the rigging, looking baffled and baffling. There's a famous Thurber cartoon caption, attached to one of his lumpish ladies: 'What do you want to be inscrutable for, Marcia?' That's rather how one feels about The Sailor from Gibraltar, so tantalisingly romantic in theory, so irre- vocably lumpish in practice.