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Salient. Victoria University of Wellington Students' Newspaper. Volume 31 Number 15, July 9, 1968

Films

page 12

Films

Roman through the gloomin'

Pamela Franklin and others in "Our Mother's House".

Pamela Franklin and others in "Our Mother's House".

I want to briefly extol on three films (from important directors) that have received an unconcerned amount of praise, detached interest, in the Film Quarterly medium qualifying as "short notices".

Jack Clayton's Our Mother's House and Robert Mulligan's Up The Down Staircase are latest works, but since Cul-de-Sac (1964), Roman Polanski has made The Fearless Vampire Killers, and Rosemary's Baby (both due here soon). Young Polanski has had the courage to abandon the healthy intellectualist shores of Poland (a demi-cinematic paradise now) after graduating from a school where his distinct style (Two Men and a Wardrobe, nife in the Water) startled the world, and left for England to make the clinically-important Repulsion, and now, the blackest bravura comedy, Cul-de-Sac (N.Z.F.S.)

It is a brilliant, even "dotty-surrealistic" comedy, combining elements of Ionesco, Pinter, Joe Orton and, most of all, dear old Sam Beckett. In fact, the film is almost (excuse me) "as original as that rare bird in the shaggy aog story, flying in ever decreasing circles and finally disappearing up its own formula."

Two gangsters (Lionel Stander and Jack MacGowran) are running away from a bungled job, and their car is stranded in the middle of a causeway connecting a medieval castle-island from the mainland of Northumbria. They are both wounded and the opening words from little Alby (MacGowran looking like a wounded peacock) "Y'know, we're in the shit!" sets the mood of the film.

On the island is the retired neurotic Donald Pleasence, prancing around in his wife's (Francoise Dorleac) nightie, mascarared and effeminate, until he is humiliated by the nocturnal meeting with Stander. The tide separates the island, and they rescue Alby En his car. They all get drunk and the humour startles when Alby presses some binoculars to his eyes. His telescopic glasses crack and he squeaks, "I can't see the Little Bear!" They bury him (and almost Pleasence) and Stander takes over the island. He is waiting for Katelbach (Godot?) to come to the rescue, a mysterious gangster who is only heard in a series of inane telephone calls.

Francoise is carrying on with a youth from a neighbouring island. Some friends arrive, and when Stander plays the "perfect Hollywood butler" the dialogue sings.

"Well, I think, I'll make an omelet." "Can't I help you?" "Two to make an omelet; Are you joking?" The farce persists, recalling especially the Marx Bros and the best of Blake Edwards.

The friend's small son runs around the castle digging into Alby's grave, hitting hens, scratching records, kicking people and firing a double-barrel shot gun at the St. Cuthbert stain-glass window. They are finally humiliated by Pleasance and Co., beyond endurance and are sent whimpering away.

Afterward, Dorleac places newsprint between Slander's toes, and lights it. He is so enraged he beats her with a rope and smashes into Pleasence, breaking his glasses. He attempts to retrieve a tommy gun from his car and Pleasence shoots him repeatedly. Spitting blood, he fires at his car, and blows it up. It is a curiously chilling and ironic scene. Dorleac is rescued by one of the friends, and Pleasence is left running through the water, and quietly sobbing, sitting on a rock in the middle of the ocean.

Gilbert Taylor has photographed this lunatic romp in beautiful black and white entirely on location on Holy Island. His subjective manoeuvres in keeping up with the actors, running walking with them, distorting their ugly faces, even uglier, is kept in control. Polanski, like Wilder, has learnt to respect the art of detail too—glasses, eggs, windows and Rob Roy.

Pleasance is remarkable, and quite mad, yet articulate—it's a shimmering spasm of a performance. Lionel Stander (an old Hollywood pro) wno has "a voice full of gravel, and a face full of cauliflowers," is glum and cheeky, and La Dorleac (who was killed in a car smash last year) is lovely and French to the bone. It's all Polanski's way of beating up beautiful performances, and watching them suffer in a constant ecstacy, at our expense.

The house that Jack built

Douglas McVay (F & F critic) finished an article on Jack Clayton, praising his Pumpkin Eater as one of the finest works to emerge from a British studio ever, and said: "One can only hope (if without immense confidence) that the miracle will happen for a second time with Our Mother's House. But even if it doesn't, it will surely happen again at some stage in Jack Clayton's future career. Talent like his, once matured, is bound to go on reassurting itself."

I have met so many people who said that this film was disappointing. They hated kids, especially that clean gooey-spoken British child; they thought it "fell down" when adults (Dirk Bogarde, Yootha Joyce) made their appearances. They, in fact, disagreed with the original intent of Julian Gloag's novel. Bloody hell!

Clayton has always been a technical master. His films are precise, elliptical, straight forward and deeply satisfying. There were some who thought The Innocents was too loosely based on James' Turn of the Screw (Truman Capotes whimsical dialogue was a bit much, they said), and The Pumpkin Eater too literal (for Pinters superb script), and his confusing Resnais influence. Like McVay, I consider The Pumpkin Eater a fine complex and masterly film.

Our Mothers House (M.G.M.) is corruption, spiritual mismanagement, innocence reversed, a film where lighting (impeccable Larry Pizer) is as highly contrasted and important to scenes as it was in Persona and Laughton's Night Of The Hunter.

Six children witness the death of their mother in an old house. They bury her in the garden and in the tabernacle, or shrine (an old shed, complete with mother's extra-hair and mirror compactum) they enact their powerful "mother-time" through Diana (Pamela Franklin) who acts as a medium to the children's needs and care. Clayton brilliantly blurs her face as she rocks in the darkness "effectively hinting at the dissolution and substitution of personality." Charlie, their dad, (a cockney and childlike Dirk Bogarde) arrives but didn't win the confidence of Elsa (Sara Nicholls). The others eventually get to know of his cheek to rob them of all the money in their mother's savings account. (Little Jiminee can forge cheques brilliantly!) The housekeeper (Yootha Joyce, a little prettier than in Pumpkin, but wait until you see her in Finney's Charlie Bubbles!) provokes Charlie.

There's a noisy party and Diana finds him in bed with a whore. He arrives home drunk late one night and the children are in the dark, seated by the fireside. He begins to rave about their St. Violet Hook (mother) who, as a vicar's daughter, "couldn't get enough of it", and how they are all bastards. He flings a cameo of her into the fire. Diana rushes forward and beats him to death with a poker. The children, crying, leave soon after, with their budgie, for where?

As in The Innocents (Miss Franklin's first movie), Pumpkin, and Room at the Top, it has been proven that Clayton's adept handling of children has not been rivalled by anyone. Its bewildering atmosphere is tender, the wideeyed children going about their individual tasks. Because little Gerty has allowed a foreigner to give her a ride on his motor bike, "Mother says her hair must be cut off, or no Mother's comb." The eldest boy horrifyingly does this, with the child's screams intensifying, and distorted lens providing the most moving parts of the film.

Georges Delerue (the greatest film composer alive) provides a score of such haunting compassion and vestigal texture, it alone for me is the deciding factor, separating the film from the soggy horror tale it isn't, into the beautifully lethargic and visually devastating little film it is.

Uplifting Teach

While Robert Mulligan's sober, delightful, Up The Down Staircase (Warners-Seven Arts) went one week in Wellington, the similar eternal narcissistic Look at Lice, To Sewer ... , still continues to scrape even lower social strata to keep it in business.

Made before the other, it is gently unassuming and as competent as any other Mulligan films—whimsy as To Kill A Mockingbird, moving and unsentimental as Baby The Rain Must Fall, and as unsure-of-itself-but-take-me-as-I-am Inside Daisy Clover. It is restrained in its fresh treatment of faces, real faces in a real New York School, the claustrophobia of the corridors and the hectic devotion you must have to be a teacher.

Sandy Dennis' Sylvia Barrett, is a perfect realisation of novelist Bel Kaufmans character. She is lovely and frail and does not at all live up to the expectations of her "twitching mannerisms," depicted in Mad, and referred to in the best of unwholesome American reviews.

Her method style, nervousness, stuttering, at times unable to express her words clearly against the screaming class, gives the film its true style. It catches the class off-guard time and time, particularly the students who's lives suddenly seem to depend on her words and how she expresses them.

The bad boy (a too handsome Jeff Howard) continues to be bad despite her worries and trouble-talks; sad little Alice (Ellen O'Mara) unable to express her love of fellow teacher/slob (Patrick Bedford) leaps out a window; the "Me" who writes birthday congratulations to himself in the question box reveals his identity (Jose Rodriguez as himself!) after the class mock-trial.

Bells and buzzers are heard continuously at Calvin Coolidge, and a voice eternally shrieks "Disregard All Bells!' Exterior New York is exquisitely muted through Joe Coffey's camerawork, and there's a touching pleasant score of ocarina, guitar, flute by Fred Karlin.

It is a most natural and entertaining little (just over two hours!) film, and I am in debt, and say thank you, to Warners for giving Wellington its first NZ release, regardless of the uncontrollable nature of that black Cod's eternal coming, preventing the release of Accident (if ever), Camelot, Charge of the Light Brigade, and here we go again for '69 with Guess who's coming to Dinner? You should be able to.