REVIEW OF THE ARTS
Cinema
Silk
purses
Christopher Hudson
At a time like this, bedazzled by Images, unnerved by The Strange Vengeance of Rosalie and bewildered by what happens when Hammersmith is Out, a reviewer longs unfashionably for a return to those down-to-earth films, rooted in the life of ordinary people, which told a straightforward story in a simple way, with heroes and heroines, beginnings, middles and ends. But when a film comes along which attempts such a return, it becomes all the more apparent that those days are gone for good. A production company films the simplest of subjects and makes out of a sow's ear an empty silk purse. The simplicities become naiveties; the delicate dwindles into the charming; behind it all, a desolation. Such a film is The Ragman's Daitighter (' X ' Rialto). Alan Sillitoe wrote the screenplay from one of those stories of his in which you wash off three layers of grimy naturalism to expose a streak of sentiment as soft as a baby's bottom. It is about a Nottingham teenager who doesn't want to work and scrounges a living through petty larceny. He meets the daughter of a rich rag merchant, and she goes along with him for kicks. They fall in love, and pilfer between clinches, but eventually her bravado lands him in prison and he never sees her again. Much older, he remembers in flashbacks these episodes from his youth.
Here, it might seem, we have a simple romantic tale, straightforward in situation and with a down-to-earth setting. But the opening shot, held for the duration of the credits, of a lovely blonde on a chestnut horse clip-clopping slowly down the perfectly cobbled street, gives a saccharine taste of what is to come. After some interesting early dialogue, we are hustled into the safety of stock situations. The thieving is too easy ( (it takes the quite inexperienced boy only ten seconds to break a complicated safe), and the lovemaking consists of discreet, perfunctory grapples on a bed, together with some leaping around in nearby meadows. Simon Rouse is convincing as the young thief, but Victoria Tennant is too glamorous and ladylike to make a believable ragman's daughter, her accents those of Roedean or Cheltenham rather than the local grammar. For some curious reason the flashbacks are set in the present day. But, on reflection, any time-scale is superfluous: the Midas touch of producer/director Harold Becker has fashioned a golden stereotype out of the unprofitably original and genuine.
Better perhaps to return to the films which don't attempt to describe the real world. Richard Burton, who five years ago appeared as Dr Faustus, now takes the chance to play Mephistopheles — alias Hammersmith — in Peter Ustinov's new film Hammersmith is Out (' X ' Odeon, St Martin's Lane). Elizabeth Taylor remains the bait — a fate for which she is endowed by nature and the box-office. Like much of Ustinov's work, Hammersmith is entertaining enough for me to recommend you to see it, and yet ultimately disappointing and fruitless, full of witty lines and bright ideas thrown away.
We begin with Hammersmith in an asylum for the criminally insane, run by Ustinov in his Viennese Jew disguise. He is strait-jacketed (sitting under a sampler that reads 'Busy Hands are Happy Hands ') but it isn't long before he mesmerises an attendant, Billy Breedlove, into releasing him, after promising him riches and power. A succession of murders provides Breedlove with a Mercedes, a ' conservative blue,' suit, a night-club and a hugely profitable' pill factory — but still Hammersmith isn't satisfied. Breedlove (a fine, comic performance from Beau Bridges) is made to sell out to a Japenese combine and use some of his wealth to support a presidential candidate, who is, of course, elected. Breedlove is too incompetent to be rewarded with political responsibility, but "by one of those happy compromises which characterise a mature democracy" he is made Ambassador-atlarge and travels around fomenting peace, before retiring to a castle in Spain.
At this stage the farce slackens and
there is nothing to do except watch Elizabeth Taylor as a dumb redhead act everyone else out of the picture. There is what appears to be a clever twist at the end, when the Doctor tacitly allows a new attendant to make contact with the newlyincarcerated Hammersmith — something along the lines of good needing evil to survive — but the film is so determinedly frivolous that even the intended Faustian allegory bears too heavily on its frail structure.
Images (' X ' Curzon) and The Strange Vengeance of Rosalie (' X' Studio One) are best seen, if seen at all, as horror films. Susannah York's performance in the first as a tormented schizophrenic is wholly acceptable, and that her mind's confusion should be represented by a confusion of images in the film is a courageous experiment by Robert Altman, occasionally producing effects which are novel and dislocating. But the lush, pictural cinematography muffles the sharpness of her sensations: and many people, come to that, would find it easier to sympathise with a neurotic lady who didn't have a sunken bath and a telephone in every room.
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