Christmas treat for the young
Nigel Andrews
Christmas is almost upon us, and with it the annual spate of children's films destined to keep the cinemas busy during the winter months. Traditionally one of the cinema's silliest seasons, the Christmas holidays this year promise for once a fairly encouraging programme, with William Sterling's all-star musical version of Atice's Adventures in Wonderland arriving as a worthy successor to last year's Tales of Beatrix Potter, while even hardened critics at a Monday morning press show were visibly moved by The Amazing Mr Blunden (` U ' Curzon), a children's film written and directed by Lionel Jeffries with much of the style, humour and period sensitivity that he brought to his first film, The Raitway Children.
The story indeed revolves once again around a family who, struggling to make ends meet after the death of their father, uproot themselves from London and move out to the wilds of the country. Their mother having taken employment as caretaker of an old ruined mansion, the two children, Jamie and Lucy, soon discover that the place is haunted. The ghosts, an orphaned boy and girl of their own age, have ' returned ' from the past, leaping 100 years, to seek help in their struggle against a corrupt, neglectful guardian and a bullying housekeeper who are conspiring to kill the boy off and claim his inheritance. Aided by another ghost, the "amazing Mr Blunden " — a jovial, whiskery family solicitor who has returned from the past to atone for his own neglect of the children 100 years ago — Jamie and Lucy travel through time to help their new friends to victory.
Like The Railway Children, the film's vitality comes from setting off its simple, homely Edwardian family (Dorothy Alison replacing Dinah Sheridan as the children's gentle and long-suffering mum) against a supporting cast of hilarious eccentrics. Outstanding among these is the blowsy, strident housekeeper Mrs Wickens, given to muttering dark imprecations at the kitchen table (adorned with a large wormeaten cheese) and played by a Diana Dors impenetrably disguised in grey hair, wrinkles and wart. Running her a close second is James Villiers's playboy uncle, who, discovered in his bedroom watching his ex-chorus girl wife perform a Grecian striptease, announces disdainfully that she is "entertaining me with classic moments from history."
The story meanwhile, based on a novel called The Ghosts by Antonia Barber, has just the right, tantalising touches of mystery, which are splendidly played up in Jeffries's direction, tracking his camera sinisterly along a crumbling, cobwebbed stair rail as Lucy makes her first, nervous exploration of the house, or accompanying the family's first arrival at the ramshackle lodge with the familiar horror film repertoire of studio mists and owl hoots. There are indeed enough sophisticated, tongue-in-cheek touches (Uncle Bertie "took an unusual interest in the ballet" intones the narrator to a shot of that character ogling a line of leggy chorus girls in a smoke-filled bar-room cabaret) to suggest that the film will go down every bit as well with grown-ups as with the children — and to encourage the feeling that Lionel Jeffries is a director well worth watching in the future.
On the other hand; it is hard to enthuse about the latest offering from another British director, Michael Winner. In a prolific career which began with some promisingly offbeat contributions to the ailing British cinema — The System, The Jokers, I'll Never Forget Whatsisname — Winner now seems to have hit an all-time low, his output deteriorating into a• monotonous series, of ' B ' standard Hollywood potboilers. The Mechanic (' AA ' Odeon, Leicester Square), is a particularly • pedestrian and featureless little thriller about a hired assassin (for which ' mechanic ' is the American slang term) who unwisely takes on the son of one of his recent victims as a paid assistant. The story's climactic duel to death, set in Italy for no evident reason beyond some eye-catching scenery, generates much violence but little excitement.
Those who like their heroes dour and expressionless may well find some hidden appeal in Charles Bronson, who walks through this film as through Winner's earlier Chato's Land, with the ashen countenance and rigid gait of a Hammer film zombie. The hero-as-automaton concept has developed from Bond, through Caine in Get Carter and Roundtree in Shaft's Big Score, to reach its grisly nadir in Bronson's screen persona, 'and one can only hope that a new line in anti-heroes is being developed rapidly to take its place. Meanwhile, all The Mechanic has to offer as a substitute for any human interest is a technically virtuoso opening sequence in which a man is assassinated by a chain of deftly synchronised ' accidents ' in his gaspowered apartment, and the token satisfaction of seeing both heroes get their just deserts before the end credits.
"Where Willard ends . . ." says the publicity, "Ben begins." Ben (' X ' New Victoria), a sequel to the earlier horror film about rats, centres on the relationship between Danny, a lonely ten-year-old boy suffering from a chronic heart condition, and Ben, the leader of a large pack of rats who are currently terrorising a small suburban neighbourhood. Ben takes to tapping sociably on the boy's bedroom window late at night, while Danny in turn accepts the rat's invitation to visit his home in the sewers. Their friendship is brought to a tragic end when the city authorities, distressed by the growing number of deaths in the vicinity caused bY mass rodent attacks, decide to wipe out the rats. Ben dies a hero's death, panting out his last breath on Danny's work-table while the boy gropes tearfully for his first aid kit, and Danny himself is left alive to ponder the last, cryptic words of the police chief: "You know . . . if they were four feet tall, we'd lose." All in all, a prettY chilling experience.
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