Cinema
Unfamiliar Picture
By ISABEL QUIGLY
Tiger Bay. (Leicester Square Theatre.)—The Sound and the Fury. (Carlton.) J. LEE THOMPSON is the only British director (of feature films at any rate) who manages to show our national life and atmosphere as raucous, vigorous and exuberant. His temptation is to slither into fruitiness, into stagy bounce and jollity and a too heightened view of particular idioms and behaviour; but the effort to bring out the tough variety of place and class and feature is something that wants applauding even when it only half succeeds. Outside Britain, his films . arouse surprise and interest and even incredulity, so unfamiliar a picture does he present of us : as good an antidote to the conventional view of British institutions as it is to the generally held view of the British character, for his people are passionate creatures and the physical world about them, however drab, is, to match them, pas- sionately observed.
His Tiger Bay (`A' certificate) is set in Cardiff,, in a slum district near the docks where coloured faces are more frequent than white and an accepted part of the landscape : an unpretentious' film about a child which seems to achieve a greater authenticity than some of his more 'am- bitious and apparently deliberate efforts at social realism. In fact, his direction is excellent (though unobtrusive), at once deft and tough, and no one can judge to what extent he has been brilliant, to what extent lucky, in achieving the perform- ance he does from John Mills's daughter Hay- ley as the child who sees a murder and makes friends with the murderer. For a performance as convincing as this from a child must always be a mystery, like the subtleties of the child in the story who lies to adults with an enthusiasm and a haphazardness that leave one (as children do) pretty well in the dark about motives. How much that makes up the performance is instinct, how much understanding, how much adult direc- tion, how much a matter of presence and per- sonality and freshness, no one can tell : what counts is that in this girl on the shambling, charm- ing edge of adolescence one seems to find all child- ren, all the reactions of childhood and even the reactions of adults towards all other children. After the press show no fewer than five mothers were gathered in a group saying how much she re- minded them of their children, male or female and all ages from two upwards; for this reason, perhaps, she can twist one's heart with a sniff or a grimace : indeed, her conspiratorial faces look so private and unobserved that one wonders how the director caught them, or how she came to reproduce them at the right moment. And, utterly delightful as she is, there is nothing, nothing contrived about her, nothing 'cute' or actressy for all the undoubted virtuosity she shows : she seems simply (for all her strong individuality) the essence of childhood, of all that puzzles and eludes as well as enchants those who have outgrown and (almost inevitably) forgotten it, of a world that adults cannot enter. John Mills is unpushingly good as the police in- spector. the young German actor Horst Buch- holz excellent in the difficult part of the sym- pathetic murderer.
Stylists—writers with an unmistakable and obtrusive style—are not, as a rule, very filmable : if only because the skeleton of their work—plot and character and situation—may, stripped of its style, so often sound absurd. The Sound and the Fury (director : Martin Ritt; 'A' certificate), from a novel by Faulkner, sounds pretty good non- sense in outline, if only because an outline of its plot reads like a parody of every other Deep South story. I have , not read the novel, but imagine some drastic bowdlerising must have taken place between the book and the film, if only to explain what the publicity handout means when it calls it : `A blistering story of love and transgression that breaks the unwritten com- mandment.' Blistering? Unwritten command- ment? Perhaps this all applies to Faulkner, and has somehow been mislaid on the way.
`Living in a decrepit Colonial mansion,' the handout goes on to say, `are Jason (Yul Brynner), son of the present Mrs. Compson (Frangoise Rosay). by her first husband, his stepbrothers, Howard, a useless drunkard, and Ben, an idiot, Quentin (Joanne Woodward), the seventeen-year- old illegitimate daughter of their sister Caddy, who left home when her child was born, and their Negro servant Old Dilsey (Ethel Waters).' Im- possible, perhaps, to make more than pastiche out of that, and Mr. Ritt has directed it with all the stops out, boldly heedless (it would appear) of likely laughs. And the acting matches : everyone `performs' to the point of hamining, and every performance brings echoes of others like it. Margaret Leighton plays the ageing nympho- maniac with the half-dreadful pathos of Vivien Leigh as Blanche du Bois—with even the same sort of clothes, the same almost skeletally thin, ravaged remains of beauty. Yul Brynner, though his presence persuades a bit, is every film hero that starts with a veneer of villainy—tough out- side, tender and loving inside, if only anyone could (as the audience at once can) see. And the much-praised Miss Woodward failed to persuade me that she was an adolescent girl in behaviour or in looks, or (more .important) that she had anything touching about her to get over the singularly unattractive gaucheness of mind and body enough to make Jason fall in love with her.
There are some good moments from Francoise Rosay and Ethel Waters, and a rather moving impersonation from Jack Warden as the dumb idiot brother looked after by a tiny, bright Negro boy, cruel and loving. But as a picture of Southern life or a study of human relationships the film utterly fails to convince one, being strangled by local colour and an unwavering belief in the commercial possibilities of the most uncommer- cialised parts of the South, where the only way even Mr. Brynner can make a living is by working in the town's general store.
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