CINEMA
Greeks and ancients
Christopher Hudson
A few days ago I managed to catch up with Face to Face ('X') at the Venus Cinema in Kentish Town. It is a bright and lively Greek film about a teacher of English who is employed by a rich, sophisticated family and seduced by the very sexy eigh teenyear-old daughter he is supposed to be teaching. It is, as it happens, much more than that: and it makes its more controversial points with a witty cleverness which suggests we might be hearing more of Robert Manthoulis, the director.
For instance Manthoulis films a big military parade through Athens, in which a beribboned army veteran is seen clicking stiffly behind the tanks on his two artificial stumps. In the next shot the clicking continues over the soundtrack but is synchronised to a baby's footsteps as it waddles across to its father. In another sequence, equally sarcastic, a group of rich, boozy, elderly Greeks, after a gluttonous all-night party, turn out in their cars to watch the sun rise behind the Acropolis. At the end a "stand up and be counted" speech by the daughter to the young men of Greece comes through the intercom beside the front door bell-pushes. But her teacher has already gone home.
Manthoulis has given a lot of his thoughts and talent to Face to Face. It is entertaining, if a little pretentious at times, and well worth seeing. But it is unlikely that you will have much chance to see it, even if you live in London. On the evening I went, there were five people in the cinema — six if you count the ticket-selling girl who looked in once or twice out of boredom. Announced as coming shortly was The Abductors, a squalid collation of cold steel and heaving flesh which will give the Kentish Town locals something to. work themselves up over. By the time you read this, Face to Face will probably be to Connoisseur Films' hiring-out catalogue.
Jack Lemmon's first film as a director, Kotch (' AA ' Cinecenta) is designed to fortify the over-seventies with a picture of how an elderly man can be as wilful, tough and independent as his children and grandchildren. Walter Matthau, hair dyed silver, is the senior citizen whose aggressive good spirits eventually prompt his dismal son and daughter-in-law into introducing him to an Old People's Village. Matthau rebels, and goes and rents a cottage in Palm Springs where he cooks and housekeeps for himself until the family's pregnant ex-babysitter with whom he has struck up a friendship moves in for some pre-natal pampering. Naturally he finds himself having to deliver her baby — a moment calculated to bring a little warm glow to all aged cinemagoers as they reflect that octogenarians can usher in the new, if they can't actually set it going. Matthau is good, but the film otherwise is superannuated.
If recent films are anything to go by, the West County is populated entirely by mur derous, semi-literate yokels. Straw Dogs had its quota of turnip-heads grunting bestially under the moon, and now Dul cima (' A ' ABC1 Shaftesbury Avenue) brings us a Zummerzett farmer nursing the most unlikely homicidal tendencies. Carol White is the village girl, Dulcima, who comes Out of pity to tidy up the farm, and stays out of greed to share the farmer's bed and wheedle some of his money out of him. John Mills plays the farmer, with an accent you could cut with a ploughshare and a selection of the manic grimaces he learnt for the part of the idiot in Ryan's Daughter. Carol White, good to look at, makes what there is to make of her part: but when she has to fall for a devilishly handsome gamekeeper who likes living by himself, plays the guitar and arranges pebbles on his windowsill, our barely-held interest is extinguished. Except, I suppose, in the fine photography of the countryside, which might encourage coach parties.
Vampire Circus (' X ' New Victoria) is not a film for purists. Its director, Robert Young, has fallen over himself to provide a thrill a minute. As a result the fihn is as episodic and inconsequential as the circus acts that it centres upon. The victims of vampire bites die immediately, leaving us to wonder how the race perpetuates itself; the dialogue is more fatuous than usual without being genuinely parodistic as it was in Polanski's splendid Dance of the Vampires; and the number of shining crucifixes, stakes through hearts and fangs. snappinglike piranha fish suggest that those concerned with the production are devoid of a proper respect for the genre.
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