CINEMA
Prison Island
Cul-de-Sac. (Cameo- Poly, `X' certificate.)—The Moving Target. (Odeon, Leicester Square, `A' certificate.) THERE was seldom such a shooting star as Roman Polanski, whose name, made over- night, now seems firmly wedged in the morning after. His Knife in the Water seemed something bold and brilliant and most of us squawked with excitement and anticipation; and if his second film, Repulsion, looked pretty meretricious rub- bish, there was always (since second efforts gften stumble and are unreliable guides to progress) the third to wait for. Here it is now, to hammer, I'm afraid, a bigger nail than ever in the coffin of his reputation. Cul-de-Sac isn't just worthless, it is pretentiously worthless, which is worse; in fact it actually seems like self-parody, with all the self-congratulatory tricks of a man going round in circles.
The situation repeats that of Knife in the Water: husband, wife and another man isolated in tense circumstances, with nature to contend with (tides, mostly) as well as their own passions. Polanski has always enjoyed watching exaspera- tion mount, rubbing his people together till sparks fly of rage and sensuality. pushing them into physical proximity at once loathsome and ludi- crous and exciting. But in Cul-de-Sac, where an ill-matched pair living on a Northumbrian island are joined by an escaping criminal, the charac- ters never develop enough to rub up any convinc- ing friction.
It would have taken a Builuel, in any case, to make credible and pitiful a couple as repulsive as Polanski's here. Cut off from everything but each other in a hilltop castle, he obsessed with the whore for whom he has left his wife, his work, and all his old life and she (presumably) greedy, together they are about as horrible a pair as ever wounded gangster stumbled over. 'I'm staying as long as I've got to, but don't think it's any fun,' says their ape-like but by comparison with them agreeable guest; one of those unfortunate remarks that send ironic cheers of agreement round a captive audience. Donald Pleasence plays the husband with manic glee and a shaven head; Francoise Dorleac the wife with great swathes of hair she keeps peering through. Of course, Polanski hasn't lost his basic skill with
landscape, with things; but his people (and it is as a psychologist that he clearly wants to be taken) are impossibly silly.
From a pretentious flop to a modest success: The Moving Target (director: Jack Smight) is a thriller in which the people work, in which no one seems to try very hard (as Polanski does) but everything goes right. In a film world of secret agents working for enormous governments against jumbo odds, we go back to the gum- chewing private eye called in for a mere domestic disturbance. He's Paul Newman of the grave Greek profile, now greyish and plugging the middle-aged image: with no less than Lauren Bacall, Julie Harris, Arthur Hill, Janet Leigh. Robert Wagner and Shelley Winters to back him. No superman like Bond, no neat-fingered bachelor, like Deighton's agent, he fumbles around in semi-squalor at home, forgetting to buy coffee and taking the old grounds out of the bin to re-use. He doesn't drink before lunch, seems to feel pain when they hit him, seems to hate death when he sees it : altogether a change. He is even monogamous, in spite of Pamela Tiffin in a circular bed and Miss Bacall, cool as ever, in a wheel chair.
ISABEL QUIGLY
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