Cinema
Hung for a Lamb
By ISABEL QU1CLY
Billy Budd. (Leicester Square A Times fourth leader took me to task not long ago for sug- gesting that in criticism 'charm' had become something of a dirty word. I'm Sticking to it, though. In our emotional climate these days to say that something in the arts has charm is generally criticism by default : 'Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer. And with mil sneering teach the rest to sneer.' In fact; the' Possession of superlative charm even outside the arts, in everyday life. is the signal for all sorts of civil leering; and in a film-- why, it needs a quick. apology, in both senses of the word, before people scuttle for the exits.
Peter Ustinov's film of Billy Budd ('U' certi- ficate), from Melville's story and through a play of it, is so extraordinarily attractive that one finds tt necessary to take on that half-apologetic air; to explain that it isn't prissy or prettified, but Magical and intelligent, that amazingly a boy was found to embody perfect goodness who actually manages to charm shipmates and audience alike, and that a fairly obvious symbolism has been gtven depth not by realism but by the emotional truth and validity of everyone around. What I Specially liked about it was its feeling for the period, the end of the eighteenth century; not in th. obvious sense that the shoe-buckles and rig- ging were all correct (they may have been. or not), but in the sense that it felt like England before the nineteenth century closed in on it. The men behaved in the way I feel they may have done be- fore the things we connect with the Victorian age got such a grip on the national character that they seemed to have been there forever: they weren't afraid to weep or laugh or show horror or dis- gust, in spite of the fierce discipline, because the Miff upper lip hadn't been invented—not in the way we know it `at least; so they managed to look refreshingly unlike characters in a British film because they were living before the conventions of modern life took over. Everyone seems indi- vidual, a bit mythical and remote perhaps, but beautifully
round and free. unconventionalised and seen-in-the- .
The story is on two levels: parallel symbolism rutts through every action. From the Rights of Man' a happy merchant-ship, Billy Budd is Pressed into service on a warship, the Avenger. Soon everyone, from the captain down, loves him, except the master-at-arms, pure evil, who plots his downfall and accuses him (it's at the time of Spithead and the whole navy feels like a tinder- box) of Planning mutiny. Billy, seized by a stam- e'er that conies with excitement, can't protest, xteelit,with a blow. He knocks down the master- a;4t:iris and by mistake kills him : the penalty is death, Morally he is innocent, and every man on floe shiP would give his life to save him; but the
law says he must be hanged, and, blessing the cap- tain, hanged he is.
The credit for making what might have been a sea-going Pollyanna into someone human and credible goes largely to a new actor called Terence StaMp, whose remarkable beauty (no other word for it) and daziling engagingness were hidden under the scowl and sideburns of a schoolboy lout in Term of Trial not long ago. Ustinov plays the Captain very straight and sad, very movingly and authoritatively towards the end. Melvyn Douglas, who played smooth leading men in my early film-going days. is eerily good as a mystical old Danish sailor. Paul Rogers, John Neville. David McCallum, the three officers forced to con- demn Billy, and far more pitiable as they do so than he is, stick in one's head too, as the whole atmosphere of this rather magical morality-play does.
Back to everyday conventions of film-making in Tony Richardson's The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (`X' certificate). from Alan Sillitoe's story: and no need to apologise for any charm or eeriness about this, since it has neither : on the contrary, it has every imaginable in- gredient for success. As an illustrated guide to current fashion. with every attitude and every statement perfectly predictable and conventional. it'is the Establishment film so far, one vast, soft- centred, repetitive cliché . that sledgehammers away-at nuts so microscopic you scarcely hear the- scrunch. I am not, repeat not, agin it for its story and situation, for although we've certainly had our cinematic fill of misunderstood teds just lately, a director. who has something beyond the clichés to say about them can get over any number of corny predecessors: as PaSolini proved with Accatione. And this time, thOugh we've all the familiar circumstances, at least we've got the in- side of a Borstal as well, which is something new. And Mr. Richardson disposes of some excellent actors, in particular Toni Courtenay, who plays the boy and, actually manages to get away with lines (Sillitoe's script. I'm afraid) of the 'Dead- buf-never-called-me-mother' kind : 'You brought your fancy-man into the house before my father was cold,' and suchlike.
This story of a boy who gives up his chance of personal triumph in sport because it will also be the triumph of the Borstal governor and therefore of the whole world he mistrusts and hates ought to appear a widely applicable piece of social pro- test, an impotent human and moral gesture that means something: instead, so peevish and exag- gerated is the whole, tone, so hackneyed the imagery, so wide of. the mark the satire, above all so predictable, froM start to finish, is every- thing said, done, felt or suggested, that it trails off into a mere bad-tempered little sketch about a scowling boy, his dismal home-life, and his brushes with 'authority. What ought to have been telling satire on that authority consists of nudges and wallops so childish (the director's .view is the boy's, so that our eye-level is his, without any of the necessary distancing of art) that not only do they fail to arouse sympathy, they fail to prod one into any sort of serious reaction at all—even outrage. Mr. Richardson has only. to get hold of a good point to flog it to death: the climax of the film, for instance, when the boy stops within sight of the winning post, has everything the film has said and shown whirled on to the screen for minute after minute—about as subtle a method of showing what's going on in the boy's head as putting a balloon up with TIIINKS ... on it; or, another case, the music—the hymn 'Jerusalem' is used for various kinds of satirical effect through- out : the first time it makes its point, induces the right feelings, the second simply cancels out the effect of the first. and when it's used again and again one simply wonders at the simpleminded- ness of so much repetition. Much of the photo- graphy (with Walter Lassally as director of photography, it'S, not surprising) is very nice to look at; but the way it's used, again, is disastrously hackneyed. How often have we seen the cupolas of trees whirling slowly, for instance? Similarly the fights, the Borstal riots, even the 'lyrical' moments at the seaside, all seem somehow second- hand. All that's fresh about it is Mr. Courtenay's old-young face, with its changes from vicious to guarded to (very occasionally) tender, and his air - -so right and, in this film, so wasted.
The Dock Brief (director: James Hill; -1.)' certi- ficate), from John Mortimer's play, is a bore after the first half-hour or so because- the method is established and what comes next is inevitably repetition. The story is neat and wistful: the act- ing, most of it from Peter Sellers and Richard Attenborough, to match. Sellers plays the bar- rister who's spent a lifetime waiting for a client, Attenborough the unlikely murderer of a wife who never stopped laughing and refused to run away with the lodger. If there were only such things as short-story films, this might have turned out very well. But spun out to full length, and with such tincinematic dialogue, it palls terribly.
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