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Middle-Aged Methuselah
By ISABEL Q'UIGLY
odd bit of visual bowd- lerising goes on, if you come to think of it, in most American and British films. The two ends of life are apparently con- sidered unfit for public exhibi- tion. Not, I mean, the processes of birth and death (Which probably are), but the new-born and the very old. If there is ever a question of showing a newborn child, you very seldom see anything that remotely resembles a new-born child. A plump, blooming infant of anything from six to eighteen months is popped into the cradle, waving capable fists and gazing about-with an air of knowing per- fectly well what the cameras are up to. And in the same way there seems to be a feeling that old age is just a matter of make-up and movements; or, perhaps,' that there is something faintly grotesque, faintly unacceptable, about the genuinely ancient, as some people so extra- ordinarily feel there is about the very raw and unestablished hours-old child.
The Old Man and the Sea (director : Preston Sturges; 'LI' certificate) poured its millions into the water in an effort to .get realism from the fishes, and its sharks and sunsets and giant marlin all look as genuine as months of location work can make them. But the one thing about it that the Most unaquatic critic can check up on is the Old man 'himself. He, after all, is human, so any fellow-human can tell (more or less) what his age is. The rhythmical, repetitive text keeps telling us how old, how very , old, he is, in an incantatory alenost-hypnotic tone that has you almost ready to accept it. Then you shake-your- self and rub your eyes to see that this Methuselah- figure h none other than our spry and hardly more than middle-aged friend Spencer Tiacy. NOW Mr. Tracy is an actor you can hardly help Watching with enjoyment, and with his crew-cut White head, his air of physical stiffness and slight Mental remoteness, he does his best to imper- sonate the impossible hoariness expected of him. But he simply isn't old. Old age is as unmistak- able as infancy; and just as the six-month-old child cannot possibly retain that look of having landed on the wrong planet, which is one of the rather alarming charms of a new-born baby, so a man still in (more or less) the prime of life cannot conjure the state of mind of one who lives primarily in memory and dream. This may seem like quibbling; but a film that has gone all out for realism in everything else is asking for trouble when it falls down so obviously on its human facts.
Another quibble : the old man's hands. There is a great deal made of them, as they are cut by the line when the great fish struggles, and we keep seeing them in close-up, nastily sliced down the middle. But they look no more like a fisher- man's hands than mine do. The hands of a man 'who has lived by their work, or even of a man whose hobbies and interests involve using them, have an unmistakable hardness, an air of long use, a sort of grain about them. Mr. Tracy's haven't; and I cannot see why the film-makers, in their search for authenticity, couldn't have scrapped them and found a fisherman to lend his.
There are a lot of 'fine views' in this pains- taking and elaborate film; but 'fine views' of the sort in a film are rather like 'fine writing' in a book (something Hemingway tries hard to avoid but never quite manages to). There keep turning up the visual equivalents of purple passages, striking but-exttaneous and obtrusive bits of sea- scape and colour and the rest of it. The whole thing is contrived almost, at times, to the point of absurdity; as indeed the book is, that monu- ment of the Hemingway code and manner, stylised and often glorious, but basically sentimental, soft- centred. The boy in it is fine and the great fish impressive; Mr. Tracy, within his limitations, fine and impressive as well. In fact, the whole thing, within its limitations, can be called fine and im- pressive enough; but its limitations are those of its origins, the soft-centred Hemingway myth.
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