CINEMA

Good intentions

TOM HUTCHINSON

To stand up and applaud the pinkly aston- ished presence of Harold Lloyd at the open-

ing night of 'Cinema City' at the Round House, Chalk Farm, was an elevation de- voutly to be wished. After the ecstasy of seeing his long-mislaid comic masterpiece, The Kid Brother, we needed to raise our- selves upwards to maintain, via devotional

cheering, the film-fostered illusion that we had been touched by some ‘innocence from the golden age of film-making, brushed by the wings of myth.

On a more physical level it was good to get away, buttocks fluttering with relief, from the plastic clench of seats impressing upon us the worthiness of the cause we were cele- brating. The plush of cinemas devoted to less altruistic motives would not have been so good—nor so hard—for the soul.

Then we went to queue for champagne, star-spotting as we went, noting with demo- cratic approval that Michael Caine was having just as much trouble as us in attract- ing the barman's eye, although realising the power of television even here in this shrine of film: that bearded interviewer from 'Late Night Line-Up' had discovered an enormous pizza to eat. 'No doubt he brought it with him,' said somebody, for whom the decay of disillusion had set in.

It was, as should be any commemoration of this market-place medium that we call an art, a night to remember. For a lot of right, and some wrong, reasons. The right reasons were in what was being satened, the person- alities invited to communicate the inten- tions for which 'Cinema City' was fash- ioned. (Presented by the Sunday Times and the National Film Archive it lasts until 17 October and pays tribute to seventy-five years of cinema. The money gained will help pre- serve old classics by transferring them from decomposing nitrate film to safer materials.) The wrong reasons were in the saddening lack of organisation that fumbled a prestige occasion which should have been as glamor- ously engineered as any starlet-prone opening in Leicester Square. I write a few days after the first night and I am happy that the ex- hibition, so lovingly organised with film-clips, soundtrack and video-cassettes into twelve aspects of cinema history, is at last winningly under way. The scheduled revelations in the flesh of such deities as Cavalcanti, King Vidor, William Wyler, Gene Kelly, Anna Neagle, John Frankenheimer are now estab- lished in fact as well as faith.

But on the opening night 'Cinema City' seemed a ghost town in which exhibition areas stood semi-naked of displays, and Where projectors turned a blind eye to our desire to participate in the event. Sincerity of effort has never been a critic's excuse for poverty of performance. We had wanted to be dazzled by images—was not the title itself a grander extension of McLuhan's 'electronic village'?—but had to make do with Fred Astaire dancing in Top Hat to the mistaken accompaniment of Julie Andrews singing something from The Sound of Music. A wincing embarrassment was not excised by hearing a reporter phoning through what he considered the most relevant copy of the evening: that Princess Alexandra had been wearing the same gown as one of the guests. "'We're twins," said the Princess,' he gushed into the phone, `to save the woman any dis- tress.' All of us in this day and age are, like it or not, inhabitants of 'Cinema City' and our civic pride took a beating that evening.

It was fascinating to see in the film The Kid Brother the mirror-image of the opening night muddle. Here was precise mastery of a craft so that it is art. However many ulcers erupted during the making of this 1927 movie, however much off-camera chaos was involved, none of it was allowed to leak into our sight. In Harold Lloyd's story of the weakling brother convincing his moronic cowboy family that bespectacled innocence can overcome evil, was a history of a film in miniature: a peep-show become vision. Even Lloyd's city-slickerness, of which I have not been over-enamoured in such films as Safety Last, is made tender. There is one scene when the heroine's tears, dropping on to his hand, make him think it is raining. He puts up his umbrella, then puts it down realising his mistake. And it starts to rain. Words could not define that poetry.

But, although telling the story of an am- ateur in the business of life, the sweat of pro- fessionalism lubricates the movement of the filth. Despite the trends of more eccentric home-movie-makers, film will always remain the art of calculating an emotion, of organ- ising a situation. You aren't allowed to see the joins. That should apply to opening nights as well. '

Brilliance such as that glowing from The Kid Brother inevitably casts shadows on any other film to be reviewed in the same week, but I was surprised at the mingled critical chime that greeted The Buttercup Chain (Odeon, Leicester Square, 'X'). Behind the glossy images I admit there lurks a certain trendy conclusion about four rich young people, bound up in their own self-loving eroticism. But I found in the style of its tel- ling (director: Robert Ellis Miller) and the skill of its young actors (Hywell Bennett, Leigh Taylor-Young. Jane Asher and Sven- Bertil Taube) a developing power to move and convince about an alien relationship.

I intend a compliment when I say the at- mosphere was reminiscent of both Jules et Jim and Cocteau's Les Enfants Terrible. The feeling of claustrophic sexuality, stem- ming from male and female cousins imposing their own incestuous desires upon a zany American girl and a squarely sincere young Swede, is heightened by the lush locations in which the story is played out. What the film projects most eloquently is the solipsism of the morally-wounded young in their game of musical beds; an interior world of self- sufficiency cracked by the death of a baby.

It would have been interesting if the dir- ector had not forced the story to such a purit- anical climax. It might have been more real- istic to tell us that the wages of sin is not necessarily the wiping-away of tears, a walk- ing-away into a Stockholm longshot. That implies a smugness about the erotic hallucin- ations conjured by the sexual seance we had been watching.

The Reivers (Carlton, 'AA') is an example of American Instant Nostalgia for the Deep South world at the turn of the century; yet another wish-fulfilment memoir of a boy Growing Up. Adapted from a William Faulkner story it is remarkable for some gooctacting hiding out in a forest of clichés, especially that of Steve McQueen taking the young master (Mitch Vogel) on a whore- house spree to the big city. These journeys, in this sort of film, usually have two signifi- cant encounters to enable a boy to Reach Manhood, One is Sex, the other Racial Pre- judice. The boy confronts both of them.

A little less lush care in the direction, a little more cynicism about the values we are supposed to accept and the clash of symbols might no sepm so discordant. The Reivers moves all right, but it rarely lives. This rev- might not seem so discordant. The Reivers moves all right, but it rarely lives. This whiff of the past suffocates rather than revives.