CINEMA
Peaches and Mock Cream
The Peach Thief. (Academy Cinema Two, 'A' certificate.)—The Agony and The Ecstasy. (Astoria, IP certificate.)—A Study in Terror. (Leicester Square Theatre, `X' certificate.)
WHAT the country and what the director gives a film (which contributes what) is one of those unmeasurable things, like goodness or the size of socks. It is tempting to ascribe all sorts of national characteristics to films whose flavour may be due, much more, to the style of the director, the personality of the actors. (Especially in the case of a film which is, as far as I know, the first Bulgarian feature film to be shown here.) All the same, there's this business of light, which is mysteriously more atmospheric than physi- cal. Scandinavian light seems to shimmer, sunlight is as pearly as moonlight elsewhere; Mediterranean light bakes and glares and far away in your seat you can read your programme but not the subtitles. Then there is the fresh,
springlike light that seems to belong to eastern Europe—certainly it comes in Russian films; precariously bright, like a patch of glory between rainy seasons, lyrical and yet melancholy.
The Peach Thief (director: Veulo Radev) is steeped in this somehow ominous brightness. It is almost a relief when it rains in a scene or two, and natural melancholy seems to reassert itself. Not that it is a gloomy film—sadness isn't neces-
sarily disheartening—but that sorrow (quite cheerfully presented, like the light) is the natural, inevitable condition of its people. The time is the First World War, Bulgaria is on the German side and the capital is bursting with prisoners of war—Serbs, French, American—loosely guarded but starving. Outside the town lives the Town Commandant, an elderly colonel, worn out with the cares of an untenable position, and his young childless wife. A hungry officer breaks through the fence one day to steal peaches from one of their jealously guarded trees. The wife sees him, gives him food and boots, and falls in love. Time after time the prisoner slips out, and they meet, until, at what was to be their final meeting before they ran away together, he is shot dead as a possible peach thief.
Radev is a young director who was once a cameraman. His filming is lovingly exact and intense, rather slow, painfully touching. Most of the time he seems best on detail, small moments of truth in a game of chess, or a glance, or a shrug; but there are some panoramic shocks too: soldiers in a square, seen drilling from above, half robot, half balletic, is one. I thought the film almost uncannily beautiful at a first view: so moderate, so modest, so simple-seeming and yet so dense, packed tightly with feelings about war. love, prison, and pain. The subtitles I often couldn't read (too much sunlight), but it didn't seem to matter, which proves its visual eloquence, perhaps. A very beautiful actress, disconcertingly like Sophia Loren, plays the wife;'and her ageing husband, all cracking joints and a sort of martinet despair at the end of the only world he knows, is magnificent.
With Renoir's Boudu, which I Wrote about when it was shown at the Academy Cinema Club, and which is now publicly shown for the first time in this country, this makes an enviably rich programme.
The Agony and the Ecstasy is too bad to weep over, too sad to laugh at. Sir Carol Reed (alas and incredibly) directs. As pope and painter, battling to get the Sistine Chapel worthily ceilinged against enemies without and within (poverty, Mrs. Grundyish cardinals, armies sweeping on Rome), Rex Harrison and Charlton Heston make a stylish pair, the one as urbane as ever, the other ox-like, muffled, explosive. Setting each other off, physically and psychologically, they are by far the best thing about this fairly appalling effort to film the artist in labour (at one point he actually sits on a Mountain and sees the clouds coagulate into the shapes of God and Adam). Sillier epics by far have turned up regularly in the past few years but it is hard to see the minor virtues of this one without remem- bering, in a stricken sort of way, the films its director once made.
John Neville looks remarkably right for Sherlock Holmes; too handsome, perhaps, but that's allowable film-maker's licence. In A Study in Terror (director: James Hill) Holmes's (till now sacred) person is attached to a non- Holmesian nonsense of a story about Jack the Ripper. Just when a series of prostitutes is being nightly carved up in the streets of Whitechapel, he is posted a set of surgical instruments. A cross between Bond and Professor Higgins (sexily cool in all the colourful provocation), with sword- stick, flowing cape, apparent powers of levitation, an asbestos body, and the faithful Watson, of course, puffing along behind, he moves in on his man. An embarrassingly distinguished cast wastes its energies on nothing.
ISABEL QUIGLY
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