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Getting away with murder
CHRISTOPHER HUDSON
It is fortunate, considering the parlous state of the local industry, that foreign films don't face the kind of import costs that Hondas. French cheeses and Peter Dau- beny's foreign touring companies have to put up with. Of the new films, two are American, one French, one Italian, one Polish, one Finnish, one Swedish and one made in London by a Polish director under the aegis of a Bavarian production com- pany. Nothing for review from Britain until next week with The Tales of Beatrix Potter.
Easily the best of them is the Italian film, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion ('x'. Cameo Poly) directed by Elio Petri. On the surface, it is a superbly handled thriller. A police inspector, chief of Rome's homicide division, murders his mistress and deliberately leaves clues for his own men to follow up or ignore as integrity takes them. But the film itself as deliberately raises issues which are much more profound.
The inspector feels himself to be above the law, because he is responsible for its enforcement and is accountable to nobody. His mistress plays upon his latent paranoia by having him photograph her in the death poses of victims in the cases he's solved; by convincing him that the law cannot operate without crimes for it to confront and assimilate; and by assuring him that he is powerful enough to get away with murder. In this frame of mind, the most wounding insult to him is her taunt of impotence, and when she is unfaithful (with a student anarchist, at that) he de- cides to test his power. But like the post- man in the Father Brown story, his presence at the scene of the crime has too obvious an explanation. Driven by guilt and pride in his organisation, he altern- ately confronts his men with certainties and terrorises them into disbelief. Pro- moted to head the Political Crime depart- ment, he makes a passionate speech in defence of law and the repression of anarchy. Only when the radical student, the sole witness to his crime, refuses to de- nounce him on the grounds that a criminal administrator is the first step towards total freedom, does the inspector allow his con- science to overrule his pride. He leaves the law to decide whether his assessment of it was right or wrong. The difficult role of the police inspector is taken by Gian Maria Volonte, whose reputation as one of the finest European actors now stands a better chance of being recognised over here. Volonte brings a stunning lucidity and control to the part, and conveys terrifying autocracy and piti- ful weakness in convincing proportions. He is well supported, especially by Florinda Bolkan, a very believable mistress. The Ntn should not be missed.
Quite by chance, statements identical to Volonte's, about repression of dissident minorities and the right of the police to determine what is right and wrong, are to be heard in a short film at the Paris-Pull- man this week, which includes tape from a recent Chicago police convention. Show- ing with it is The Wanderer ('A') an attrac- tive if somewhat hurried version of Alain- Fournier's novel, Le Grand Meaulnes. The colour is strikingly beautiful and the act- ing is good; but, as usually happens with the adaptation of a full-length work which is a masterpiece in its own right, those who have read the book are likely to feel that the comparison is disappointing, and those who haven't may find that events move too fast for their significance to be fully appreciated. Le Grand Meaulnes might make a good television series spread over ten or twelve episodes, but 100 minutes isn't enough to do it justice. Deep End ('x', Academy One) is a diffi- cult film to reach any conclusion about.
lane Asher in 'Deep End' Skolimowski learnt his trade at the Polish film school where Polanski studied, and he looks at England from a similarly eerie, off-centre perspective. Jane Asher and John Moulder-Brown, however they dis- guise their accents and mannerisms, are not the likeliest couple to find as public baths attendants, and the slightly stilted dialogue lends a curious nalvet6 to their unfolding relationship. This kind of film with its story of a boy's infatuation for an older girl and its melodramatic twist at the end would have been handled by most directors over here as an intense character- study.
But Skolimowski brings to it a de- tachment and lightness of touch which make it at once fascinating and unreal. Instead of building up the tensions be- tween the boy and girl, the camera moves away for some gently humorous scenes which give no warning of the explosive- ness to come. At the end fantasy and reality intermingle, but it's hard not to conclude that the element of ,fantasy throughout is more pervasive than the director intended, so the ending is oddly disappointing.
One film which is not only to be missed but very much to be avoided is Joe ('x', released in selected areas outside London before a West End run). It is one of the sickest films to come out of America for a long time. A scraggy young girl comes back to her pad .where the kind of freak the John Birch society would dream up— a slack-jawed mumbling gorilla with hair down over his nose—sits in a bath. She undresses and gets in with him. He gets out, mainstreams some acid, and lolls back before, together, they stagger towards the mattress. We later discover that these nasty longhaired people have naked orgies and steal wallets from straight folk. On the other side of the generation gap is the girl's father, a pathetic middle-aged buffoon who beats the gorilla to death in righteous in- dignation. And there's Joe, a patriotic hardhat, stupid and belligerent, who hates niggers and hippies, believes in America— love it or leave it—and keeps a treasured collection of guns taken from wogs killed in the war. Together they take part in the orgy, stoned on marijuana, and then in a fit of self-pity go to a commune and shoot all the drop-outs dead. This way the film appeals to young and old alike, since each can see in it an image of what they hate about the other. A lot of prurient sex and mechanical violence is thrown in to clinch the appeal.
The result is something everyone can be ashamed of, from the makers to the distributors; not excluding those critics who profess to see in it a reflection of contemporary America. It wouldn't be worth the projectionist's time if it were not that Peter Boyle makes Joe a suffic- iently convincing slob to give the film some claim to artistic merit.
To deal briefly with another American film which gets its first public showing this week at the Chelsea Essoldo, there prob- ably isn't Much that needs to be said about Flesh ('x') except that the critical praise that has been lavished on it is justified. There is a lot of nudity in the film and much discussion of sex, but none of it is unnatural, hypocritical, violent or other- wise upsetting. which is more than can be said of Joe. Many people won't be inter- ested in a film about a day in the life of a bustler, and nobody is asking them to give it their endorsement. It should simply be pointed out that Flesh has a directness and confidence in dealing with its subject- matter that give it the interest of any good documentary. Warhol can't make films—at least, he hasn't made a film of any great value—but Paul Morrissey who made this one is clearly a director ofitalent, and I hope Trash, his next film, doesn't have to wait as long to be released in England.
Blushing Charlie ('x', Cameo Victoria) is a truck-driver who takes a homeless preg- nant woman on to his barge and is also attracted by jazz, sauna baths, bunnies and Fidel Castro. It mixes the same heady brew of sex and socialism as Vilgot Sjoman's last film I Am Curious—Yellow, though less effectively this time, since workers' control over production is not best advertised in a film about an unwanted baby. All the same, it is marginally better than Portraits of Women ('x', Jacey Piccadilly) which has Jorn Donner (who also directs) as a porno- graphic film-maker involved with three women. It doesn't live up to its ambi- tious title, although all the pretensions are there.
Finally to the New Cinema Club comes the other Polish film (made by Jerzy Kawa- lerowicz), a dinosaur left over from the great age of historical spectaculars. Pharaoh. Made in 1965 as stupendous cost, it hasn't pre- viously been shown in Britain for the very good reason that it's slow-moving and tire- some: not quite your Spartacus or Ben Hur. Basing its story upon a confrontation be- tween Rameses mu and his high priests, it displays the predictable accoutrements of majesty, plainsong, armies moving across desert sands and vast temples raised to the Sun God; but time passes, empires crumble and audiences no longer bow be- fore the sheer logistics of an enterprise like this.
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