Cinema
A light touch
Peter Ackroyd
Paternity ('AA', selected cinemas) rr here were about eight of us altogether in the audience, like a small gathering around a grave. It was a large cinema, forbiddingly large, and there was a tendency towards somewhat manic laughter from the two or three patrons in the cheaper seats. It was as if we had all been left stranded after some terrible natural disaster.
The 'short' calmed us down. It was called something like Europe Here We Come! and seemed mainly to be about lace-making in Romania, although there were the usual shots of fishermen gutting their catch, happy middle-aged women making Brighton rock, the inside story of a cheese-making factory, and the tourist boats of the Seine. 'Goodbye for now, or should we say au revoir?' We didn't say anything very much; the seats just creaked a bit.
And then there were the advertisements: the Jubilee Dragon restaurant, which looked like a Californian funeral parlour, a Benson and Hedges packet taken from the bottom of the sea where no doubt someone had pitched it, some ghastly young people sipping Martini on top of a mountain, and City Limits: 'My name is Vi... City Limits only costs 40p. Which is what they're paying me to do this.' Raucous laughter from the cheaper seats.
After several hours, the film appeared. Paternity is really a vehicle for Burt Reynolds. He is rather a short man, but you would never know it here. Every other actor has been chosen because he or she only reaches up to Burt Reynolds's shoulder; he must be responsible for employing more short people than Barnum and Bailey. And when the makers of the film run out of dwarves, they make sure that everyone is sitting down when Mr Reynolds enters a room. The script also makes it clear how young he looks for his age. This, of course, is a conventional cinematic technique: the film written in advance by the star's contract. It is the filmic equivalent of vanity publishing.
But Mr Reynolds is not an incompetent actor. He has a certain talent for playing romantic comedy, or comic romance, in the same manner which Cary Grant once made so popular. The secret is to look both as worldly-wise, and as distracted, as possible. But Mr Reynolds has another look which he has made his own — that blank, I'mpretending-this-isn't-happening-to-me expression which he has allied with the ironic assumption of a 'macho', brooding presence.
It almost works. As light comedies go, Paternity went. Buddy Evans, the manager of Madison Square Gardens — the equivalent, I suppose, of our own National Theatre — wants a son but not a wife; and so, after a series of adventures, he hires a surrogate mother. It sounds like a 'sexist' film — in the sense that it is indistinguishable from any other American film made between 1930 and 1975 — but the joke, here, is really on the man. Burt Reynolds plays a perfectionist, obsessively neat and tidy, wishing to avoid a messy emotional entanglement with any other human being, especially a woman. His only relationship is with his tropical fish — 'My little bebees,' he croons at them, 'my little bebees'. He is always having to scoop out dead ones with a spatula. But it's some measure of Mr Reynolds's light touch — although I imagine his touches are always light — that he manages to bring a little sympathy to the role without affecting its comic potential.
There are some entertaining scenes — a singing telegram boy goes ape and does a whole dance routine in a restaurant, and an odiously cheerful taxi driver sings 'I Love New York' as his passengers grow frenzied with boredom at the back — and some good lines. But it is not the kind of film in which anyone has to work very hard. Mr Reynolds wears a self-satisfied expression throughout the film, which does not alter; although, I think, his hair changes colour. It is a pity, though, that Paternity simply allows him to walk through. If he had to think about what he was doing and if the director had made more use of the potentially satirical effects embedded within the plot, we might have got a better film. As it was, the audience, all laughter dead, filed out and got into a taxi.
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