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Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 30, No. 8. 1967.

Film Soc showing good films

Film Soc showing good films

The University Film Society seems to be flourishing these days, in better health, in fact, than it has been for years. The dedication and effort shown by a small group has paid off, if the size of audiences is anything to go by. The only screening which was poorly attended was the Paramount showing of Sam Peckinpah's Guns In The Afternoon. This film deserved better support, for it is one of the few really good westerns made in recent years.

Although Peckinpah's feeling for the narrative line is a bit clouded, he has shown in this film and his earlier The Deadly Companions that he has a way with character and individual situations, besides possessing a superb visual sense. The colour photography in this film is magnificent, but perhaps subdued in the version we saw. Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott, as the two men in the autumn of their gunfighting careers, give wonderfully relaxed performances, and McCrea's death, after a connoisseur's gun battle, is one of the most moving I have seen. Peckinpah's third film, Major Dundee, with Charlton Heston and Richard Harris, was something of a disaster. The director had some harsh things to say about the producer, Jerry Bresler, and the version shown here was about 20 minutes shorter than the original, but I feel that perhaps Peckinpah had tackled something which was not entirely suited to his temperament or talent. It is a pity that the scheme to have him direct Tracy and Steve McQueen in The Cincinnati Kid did not eventuate, since it would have undoubtedly clarified his position in contemporary cinema.

Roger Vadim's Blood And Roses tells us nothing about the vampire legends which is not already contained in the Bela Lugosi and Peter Cushing series, and he appears most reluctant to utilise the remnants of the genre and its traditions that are to be found in the film. Most of the acting is abysmal and at no stage in the firm are we caught up in the tale as we are when Christopher Lee is breathing down our necks. But it does not matter. I found myself admiring the visual beauty of the film so often that the triteness of the whole thing was forgotten. Vadim and his photographer, Claude Renoir, grandson of the painter, have produced something which is quite stunning to look at. The muted colour photography and stark compositions, and Vadim's fluid camera movements, more than compensate for the deficiencies in other departments. If ever a film deserved to be described as "painterly," this is it. Not one for those who want to be shocked or enlightened, however.

Also good to look at, but in an entirely different way, is The Third Man. But besides Robert Krasker's photography, which effectively catches the grey harshness of post-war Vienna, the film boasts superb performances all round, a taut and dramatic narrative development, and a script by Graham Greene. There is also the famous zither music by Anton Karas, playing on the nerves and complementing the action at every turn. That marvellous actor, Trevor Howard, playing a rather bitter-mouthed security officer, and his sergeant, Bernard Lee ("M" in the Bond films) lend the film a singularly British character.

Orson Welles brings his own individual panache to Harry Lime, a part which he wrote into the script. His first appearance, seen in the half-light of a doorway with a cat purring at his ankles, and his scene with Joseph Cotten on the Ferris wheel, are two highlights of the film. Carol Reed's expert direction, with its tilted camera and interplay of light and shadow, cloaks the melodramatic framework in all the paraphernalia of movie trickery—but it is trickery with a point, done by a virtuoso craftsman. Much of the film's style seems vaguely familiar. There are so many echoes of Welles here that I can hardly refrain from attributing it to Orson's presence on the set, rather than Reed's eclecticism. The ending of The Third Man is justly famous. The beautiful Alida Valli walks down a long road lined with trees, past Joseph Cotten, who waits in the hope of claiming her love. The still camera catches the image perfectly, providing a marvellous finishing touch to a great film.

Postscript to Ulysses: Lady in a Cage, banned in this country, has opened in London. The film critic of The Times (John Russell Taylor, I believe) has described it as "a superlatively well-produced film." Of course, this statement will not influence the censor because he never reads the reviews. Nor will he be moved one jot by the fact that the film is being shown in Britain. The situation is both preposterous and intolerable.

Rex Benson