Cinema

Assault and Pepper

Kenneth Robinson

The Great Waldo Pepper Director: George Roy Hill Stars: Robert Redford, Bo Svenson 'A'. Paramount (109 minutes).

Deadly Strangers Director: Sidney Hayers Stars: Hayley Mills, Simon Ward, Sterling Hayden `AA' Rialto (93 minutes).

Young Frankenstein Director: Mel Brooks Stars: Gene Wilder, Peter Boyle, Marty Feldman, Clods Leachman 'AA' ABC Shaftesbury Avenue (106 minutes).

Rosebud Director: Otto Preminger, Stars: Peter O'Toole, Richard Attenborough, Cliff Gorman, Peter Lawford 'AA' London Pavilion (128 minutes).

First a few highlights from the week's films.

In The Great Waldo Pepper a pilot catches fire and is hit on the head by a thoughtful chum so he won't mind burning to death quite so much.

In Deadly Strangers Hayley Mills strangles her uncle and a friend simultaneously. She does this by remembering the first assault in flash-back as she carries out the second one.

In Young Frankenstein a prim maiden loses her virtue to a monster.

And to complete your entertainment, Rosebud features a Palestinian who penetrates skulls with a bradawl attached to a thumbscrew.

So whatever you see there's something to look forward to. Apart from its flaming corpse the Waldo Pepper film is good Boys Own Paper entertainment. And Young Frankenstein is really very funny, full of visual and verbal gags and bringing us Marty Feldman as a grotesque hunch-back ("I've got

a hunch"). come back to both films in a moment, if I don't forget.

The film I'd like to forget is the nasty one Miss Mills has got herself into. It's all about her getting a lift from a psychopathic killer on the run. Miss Mills doesn't know the , boy's state of mind, of course, though she often looks as tense as we are all feeling. We have always liked her old Dad and we wouldn't want anything nasty to happen to her. And we are shown what could happen, because the boy can't even stop for petrol without giving the pretty attendant a fate worse than death while he kills her.

I'm not quite sure why I found this film so nasty. I think it's because the cheap thrills depend on a crime that is also a sickness of mind. You can't feel the usual satisfaction at seeing a killer hunted down. You keep hoping both that the boy will be caught and that he will be spared in some way.

Miss Mills does, of course, spare him a return to prison by choking the life out of him. She is quite expert at this, having once tied her lecherous uncle's neck to a bed stead. And you can tell she feels rather pleased about her achievement when she experiences a last-minute flashback. This reminds her of the few moments of happiness she gave the disordered lad, by riding with him across a summer beach.

Something else I don't like about the film is the way it peeps through keyholes every time the boy looks into one. As the film says clearly enough that peeping-Toms are Potential perverts, there is something not quite right about the way it involves the audience in voyeurism.

Five pretty girls appear briefly in the altogether in Rosebud. Presu

mably the only way the director could get their clothes off was to let them be kidnapped from their beds The kidnappers are a Palestine Liberation mob who use the girls for propaganda films and insist that these are shown on television. If the films are not shown, they say, the girls will be killed.

There's some cynical chat here about the American president giv ing in because the mothers' vote is more important than the Jewish vote. In fact there's quite a bit of heavy-handed dialogue designed to Persuade us we are looking at a serious piece of Cinema. But it's largely the usual collection of fast cars and planes, hostages being bound and gagged and lots of Percussion at moments of high drama. Peter O'Toole lopes about as a CIA man, looking even more English than Leslie Howard's Englishmen. He is so like Howard in some ways that the performance seems less like good acting than a Poor impersonation.

If I had to sit through any of these films again it would be Young Frankenstein. It is so rich in jokes that its one-and-a-half hours ought to be split up into fifteen-minute serials. My favourite lines follow an animal cry from a Transylvanian forest.

"Werewolf."

"There wolf sir. And there castle," "Why are you talking like that." "Oh, sorry sir, I thought you wanted me to."

Maybe it's a mistake to quote this sort of thing. But the script, as delivered, is a delight. Gene Wilder speaks his lines, as Dr Frankenstein, with the relish of a comedian Who has also helped to write them. His collaborator was the director, Mel Brooks.

A final word about The Great Waldo Pepper. I said it was Boys Own Paper stuff and I think this in s.Plte of the sophisticated-hatchet JOb done by the New Yorker on the film. To me it is a straightforward tale. about an air ace who tries to re-live the first world war by Performing in flying circuses and in

Hollywood films. But to the New Yorker the attitude of Waldo and the other fliers suggests 'casual cruelty,' a 'pre-occupation with boyish games' and 'philosophy suitable for ten-year-olds.' That, I suppose, is the sort of thing a critic finds himself writing when he has too many pages to fill. The New Yorker also calls the film 'freshpainted, dry-eyed story-telling.' But that's what I like about it.

The ending, incidentally, is brilliant. I won't give it away. It's a teaser because you can't help hoping it doesn't mean what you think it means. It concerns the fate of Waldo (Robert Redford) and a German air ace (Bo Svenson). And it says, with no words at all, more than can usually be said about the impossible subject of war.