CINEMA
Battles and balls
PENELOPE HOUSTON
War and Peace (Curzon, 'A') Rosemary's Baby (Paramount, 'X') Where Eagles Dare (Empire, 'A') One thing the Americans and Russians have in common is their sense of the outsize. Nine- teenth century nations, they dodged our lingering eighteehth century addictions to pro- portion and scale, the persuasion that anything very large is also liable to be extravagant, ridiculous or immoral. So it seems appropriate that, if only the Russians could actually film the jumbo-pack War and Peace (the cost would break any merely caPitalist company), it should be left to the Americans to dub it. Verbally, the abridged version at the Curzon is a curious grafting together of Yankee and Soviet solem- nities: slow, carefully spoken, Eastern seaboard dialogue, with occasional relaxing glissades into 'get out of town' slang. There are more than six hours of film—the critics got it all in one improbable session; paying customers take it half at a time—and the print quality is none too marvellous. It all looks rather softer and soapier, one suspects, than the original.
Accept from the start that the book is essen- tially unfilmable, without access_ to the cogitat- ing, brooding, reflective spaces of the writer's mind. Within the limits that are left, it is pos- sible to settle—as one remembers King Vidor'§ American version doing—for a scratching at character: Audrey Hepburn's Natasha. and Henry Fonda's Pierre stick, fragmentarily, in the memory. Or there's the route Sergei Bon- darchuk -has taken, slicing the novel into blocks of action, directing balls as though they were battles and battles like balls, and no doubt hoping that some sort of characterisation still
glimmers through. Not much does. Natasha ' (Ludmila Savelyeva) is a wavering, pint-sized Audrey Hepburn; Andrei (Vyacheslav Tihonov) a lugubrious walking uniform; Pierre (Bon- darchuk himself) a misty rambler through great occasions. Hardly anyone else amounts to much more than a face with a name attached, though Kutuzov thunders around, droop-eyed under a curious bonnet, talking solid American like a refugee from John Wayne's Seventh Cavalry.
Marvellous moments: the hunt scene, with borzois loosed like elegant projectiles, fol- lowed by Natasha's supper-time dance in her black riding-habit; preparations for a ball, as the camera tracks down interlocking rooms full of fuss and furbelows; Pierre, during the burning of Moscow, coming upon soldiers out in the dark, frantic street, playing billiards on a looted table; the camera's vertical soar away from Austerlitz; the duel, with the wounded Dolohov swallowing great mouthfuls of snow, trying to steady his pistol hand as Pierre wades and surges towards him. These splinters from the novel carry all the associations of Russian nineteenth century fiction: they ought to be infallible. Borodino, an immense, blurred battlescape, opens with a sequence in which the icons are trooped before the army. Turn to the novel and one finds that it takes only a page or so, and that Tolstoy singles out the yawning priests, peevish after their twentieth Te Deum. But Holy Russia is still close to the surface, and the film takes it straight and fervently. (What English director, one wonders, could resist extending Tolstoy's hint of bore- dom to nudge us with some superior view of bumbling priests and wavering icons?) Until the last section—a soggy retreat from Moscow, a mélange of camera effects, and a close on simplistic moralising boomed out over great aerial vistas—War and Peace is less ac- tively tedious than one really expected. Or, rather, it falls reasonably into those blank patches of walking and staring and dawdling which are part of the necessary monotony of the book. But all along, it's a case of heroic resources, at the service of a dutiful, un- dynamic conception. Tiaraed extras (and no one these days copes with finery like a Russian extra) swoop across acres of glass floor. The camera tracks interminably round a ballroom, or climbs into the rafters as though one of the film's helicopters had strayed among the chandeliers. For Borodino, more tracks and more sky-climbing, to look down on ant- formations wreathed in mist. The whole film has grandeur without power: not so much a Red Square parade as a kind of Lord Mayor's Show for the screen.
Most people by now probably know the pre- cise predicament of Rosemary and her baby. All the same, it seems fairer not to give it away, since Ira Levin's fiendishly resourceful novel, and Roman Polanski's only fractionally less clever screen adaptation, depend so much on an exact balancing of the machinery of suspense. The trick of this freezing little story is to persuade its audience that it would rather have Rosemary sane (in which case practically everyone around her must be rationally accepted as an active black-magicking -prac- titioner) than have her mad (in which case she's merely doing a lot of fantasy damage to her- self). A further ingenuity of Rosemary's Baby is the way it disarms disbelief by outright exaggeration. Wan Rosemary (Mia Farrow) and her almost likeable actor husband Guy (John Cassavetes) have hardly acquired their dusty, comfortable Victorian mansion flat before they are being warned that the building is haunted by cannibals. Their neighbours (Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer) are so florid, dotty and over-inquisitive as to seem disqualified from larger or more threatening designs.
Polanski, whose recent Dance of the Vam- pires got so out of hand, here applies the tightest kind of Hitchcockian control, while at the same time hinting dangerously that he could, if he wanted, slide into a much more mischievous brand of devilment. Apprehension seeps up through cracks in the brilliantly commonplace, as some cunningly unstressed juxtapositions of jarring colour and camera angles prepare the way for larger dislocations. Appearances are mostly equivocal; and the pressure on Rosemary becomes a pressure on the audience to discard its defences and sur- render to the film's stealthy juggling with patterns of ambiguity. The best scene is perhaps the one which finds Rosemary petrified in a telephone box : a quiet crystallisation of panic and vulnerability, played off against the almost cheeky hocus-pocus of herbal potions, sinister lockets. and the witch who brings her knitting to the coven.
Whete Eagles Dare is a reckless piece of war- time adventure, awash with double-agentry, in which Richard Burton, Clint Eastwood and Mary Ure scamper about Bavaria, assault an impregnable mountain schloss (Miss Ure pop- ping in as the new parlourmaid), blow up half the countryside with explosives pulled from a single modest knapsack, and retreat in good order with a starlet winningly introduced as 'one of our best agents in Bavaria.' Alistair Maclean wrote it; Brian Hutton directs, in a perplexed. untidy sort of way. Donner. as one of Mr Maclean's Nazis might say, und Blitzen.
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