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Salient.Victoria University of Wellington Students' Newspaper. Volume 32, No. 17 July 23, 1969

Films — Three Malafluicius Jokers from U.K

page 7

Films

Three Malafluicius Jokers from U.K.

Those jejeunic metafizzouts, unconditionally unapproachable flabby cop-out movies; a dire stigmata worn by the jangling feeblest of souls, a pleasantly soon scalded, but resurrected in a Hollywood, a Lambert-swamped Mary Jane community, an uninterested chrome-ravished sensation of stardom (". … gee, ya sure know how ta confuse a fella, donteha?") revoked by the pain of commercial love.

Three honest little films, from Englishmen, are temptations of the highest order, each one of them worthy of a misplaced creator, nothing obseurantic, nothing ill-defined . … excellence par? They should be seen (or grabbed, that what) because of their hideous fintakrelian-type complexes, usually attributed to the wet and physical plutocracy of the Dizzyland industry, the tell-tale heartache of past Giants, barely shadowing their own concealment and peripotatic existence.

Gordon Flemyng began with Charlie is Dalek for the TV thing, as did John Boorman, but Flemyng made a Great Catherine (from G. B. Shaw) and Boorman, isolated by a whimsical debut, Catch us if you can (a great little film) then went big budgies to San Francisco to do Point Blank, a thoroughly Resnaisish gun drama; but Peter Yates (the eldest, he is 40) grabbed a Cliff Richard holiday musical, a comedy by N. F. Simpson that hardly a soul has scon (One Way Pendulum).

His Robbery had the makings of a new-action school, the vehicular-heartstop, but is enforced by the presence of Bullitt (though his chase seems to be overshadowed already by Collinson's The Italian Job. It seems the only things the cars don't do is to have babies!) and very soon Yates's prestige will surely rise with his John and Mary.

Despite what I was meant to think about Bullitt (Warners 7), I still had to revert to a plot summary in a Hollywood mag to find out what it was about! Steve McQueen has never acted like this before. As Frank Bullitt, he is a young San Fran detective lieutenant who has to protect a Chicago gangster until he's testified against the syndicate he has defrauded. The witness dies, killed by gunmen (one of the messiest and most revolting killings I have ever seen) and Bullitt is left alone to vindicate his apparent failure of duty. For Bullitt, "violence is your way of life".

There's the famous car chase, and eventually a lengthy gundown at a large International Airport. Yates, like Lester, stays on location, inside/outside for nearly every second of the film. Very few films have been able to accommodate an environment so evocatively and beautifully as this; nor have they dealt with cops and syndicates so thoroughly. The old system gets a real work-over for once.

It is not that Yates may be a disciple of Siegel. The car chase, for instance, is far inferior to that of the Master's in The Line-up, Superb stunt-shots, (real as real) modern techniques, brilliant colour etc., are no real substitute for excitement, originality, heart-stopping terror. Siegel just knows what is best for an audience, and all his films have proved this beyond a doubt. The Line-Up recently had the audience (and me) literally screaming as they surely did 11 years ago.

Of course we react to the chase in Bullitt: telephoto shots of great black cars, lumping over rises is even something Siegel never used. The shot of the two escapees burning to death in their mashed vehicle, gloriously revolting in colour is something technique and censorship would not have allowed many years ago.

But the real climax of Bullitt is the finale. The airport chase, inside and out. Among the silver screaming bellies of the huge jets in the dark, as they prowl around before take-off. The crowded terminal hunt, superbly suspensful, defies description. The blasting of the hunted through a glass panel (yet another sickening killing, more blood is spilled in that than any other—I am still incredulous at the Censor's discretion, certificate, but then I'd moan if it was cut too!!) and the detached, horrified cowering passengers in the building: Absolutely fantastic!

If it seems (and most likely one does get sick of plot repetitions, the same films without variations, etc.) that you will miss Bullitt because of "yet another cop film!" I would suggest you change opinion; it is in another class entirely from anything else.

It explores the aftermath of death for the first part. A hospital of death, with great close-ups of shattered bodies, feeding off great plasma bottles. Frankenheimer and his deux ex machina has never matched quite the horror Yates achieves. McQueen slumps around mumbling, unshaven, in an open cardigan, great bags under his eyes. Mr Robert Vaughan does very nicely as the opposition of sorts. (In the final sequence he says to McQueen, "Integrity is what you sell to the public. Frank, I want you to come to some compromise." McQueen, "Bullshit."

There's Jacqueline Bissett's loffely English voice, find big Simon Oakland as the chief, keeping an orderly eye on Bullitt's doings.

Peter Yates has made a superb film of the oeuvre. It is exciting and brilliantly photographed by William Fraker, probably my second favourite cameraman at the moment. My first being (of course) young Conrad Half (Divorce American Style, Cool Hand Luke, In Cold Blood and soon Goodbye Columbus) who with equally young John Boorman, Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune made a film on several Micronesian islands, called Hell In The Pacific (Cinerama Releasing Corp.) Its the best possible kind of visual movie that exposes its guts to the elements, a strong and rare film, that achieves far more that it says (a moderate pun). It is a tone poem of the seasons; an occasion when dialogue is swamped by sub/objective imagery, quaint symbolism (archaic, then), magnification of sounds orchestral (!) and natura.

Lee Marvin, an American pilot, and Toshiro Mifune, a Japanese naval officer are stranded on a small island, sometime after the end of World War II. It is the private war of these two, humourously unlaughable, their recognition of survival in respective languages; their perilous raft journey to the American dominated war ravaged empty after-math island, and in an emotional identity parade, they part. It is physically, animalistically photographed, and in the final half-hour, pretty moving. Some of the symbolism does seem heavy handed, the white doves release, the men torturing each other in Christ/log carryings, the organ score in one part, and Lalo Schifrins superb sequence of neo-classicism. (He uses the same meandering frugal themes on a piano towards the end of the film, and in the beginning sunrise, a gradual cluster build up. This is reversed in a single note in the final scenes.)

The sea is cast as a player of assorted timbres, and Conrad Hall must have at least thrown up amongst the tremendous pains of shooting in the midst of it all. I know the title is ridiculous, which is a shame, for you may have been deprived of a short but rewarding experience.

Flemyng's The Split (MGM) was taken for granted, its east of the highest and most exacting order, which I will not list, overpresented their images in uneasy set-pieces.

The robbery of a football stadium has the usual overtones, but people like Jim Brown & Co., need more than facial-chomping to do anything else other than the obvious unquotations of blackened sox-office, at which this film seems to die of lack of audience, for one. Burnett Guffey, a great photographer, stayed to his clammy tracks, the image was sharp, and the action pleasant, and terribly pedestrian.

The villains had the convictions of old dodderers; a mistress-mind of dear Julie Harris as Gladys the brains. But Gene Hackman, Warren Oates, and Donald Sutherland were something so much different; just their presence alters it all, but suspence of image is a detractive.

Pumping a nigra lady full of bullets, the blood seeping through a white shroud, and torturing your neighbourish Harlem Brown in a green-tiled steam-room (despite countless excisions Censorwise) were more in line with what was meant to be happening.

I've never really been ratty in a film before (television has the hypothesis that: extra derogatory—means sublimate the condition of catharsis long before external interference—discounting the cure for sloppy bowels, the myopia of Up The Chuff and the paedophetamimic squakings of breakwindfast MacPhersonland—can interfere with the normal occurence of sleepless dry horrors) before Interlude, that is.

I was ratty during the credits (oh! photography by Gerry How Green Was My Losey Fisher) sublimated by M. Georges Delerue (sob! repetitive commercail slop) the woosey paralysis of Werner's onestickupmanship, Miss Ferris the product of the Mad Factor Mole People, and sad Virginia Maskell who died before the film hit the screen. If you happened to see (!) Counterpoint then you saw Interlude; that is, musically speaking, minus muscles, Die Meistersinger and a piddler on the roof. "Do you love music?" "I Like music," chortles the hummable dialogue. "What's for your next concert?" "Oh …" dismissing it with an offish air, "Carnival Overture, Brahms 3" diddlee-dee.

And what playing! From the Albinoni Adagio (that Welles so usefully used backwards in his Kafka work) to Beethoven, and, and, Rachmaninov, and, and um Mozart. "I see you like Mahler," says Miss Ferris to no-one carefully shuffling through a meagre pile of Bruno Walter covers.

Ladies get hankies ready say the luscious ads as if the entire mulch is so absorbent-plus as those free summer days without worry.

John (spray me with cheese) Cleese, does zebra impressions in the skitey video rooms, and Donald (this passage will have to have consistent practice) Sutherland, gliding glibly around his little pupils—both are funny, like sheep.

Kevin Billington directed. His last effort I saw was for BBC TV, A Socialist Childhood, with St. Muggeridge; at least that wore its heart on a sleeve that suffocated the baby. Intermezzo ('souse me Leslie Howard and Ingrid B.) non droppo. P.S. The soundtrack is worse.

The guilty overshadowing of latent masterpieces, years old, is catching up with us. I felt this last week at the showing by the Wellington Film Society of Susumu Hani's innocently devastating She and He (1964). I can't ward off the feeling of encroaching doom every time I see a piece of Japanese cinema, whether it be the thrombastic stillness of Ozu or the epic longuers of Kurosawa, Ichikawa, Shindo etc., but in this case, for me, a near expression in cinemaverite style (no other word) encompassing some of the distilled purity of the free Czech cinema.

Eva Marie Sant and Gregory Peck in Robert Mulligan's Western "The Stalking Moon" now showing at the Majestic.

Eva Marie Sant and Gregory Peck in Robert Mulligan's Western "The Stalking Moon" now showing at the Majestic.

The film is (in contrasts) an essay in sociological indifference between the middle-classes of Tokyo's enormous apartment-blocks and a group of ragpickers, living in deplorable conditions just on the outskirts.

A young married couple, She (the divine Sachiko Hidari) the housewife, who accidently falls in love with a young laundry boy; and He (Eiji Okada, Hiroshima Mon Amour) spend their life coercing Ikona (the raggedly delightful Kikuji Yamasjita), a ragpicker (who went through university with He) to leave his life for the better. Ikona has a black dog Kuma, and has adopted a small blind girl. The apartment authorities erect a fence to separate them, Ikona disappears. She rescues the child that is suffering from pneumonia and looks after it while He is away on business. Ikona returns, so does He. He objects and the child is taken to hospital. The slums are bulldozed away save for Ikona. They are to be turned into super golf links.

The apartment children drag his dog away and stone it to death. She feels compelled to rescue Ikona, and in the final sequence she seems to find some consolation with her husband lying in bed, listening to the night sounds. It is utterly compelling story-telling, with a minimal use of dialogue, no wailing Eastern instruments, a cast of superlative nice-looking Japanese, and a hypnotic flair for visuals keeping in mind the most enchantingest series of natural incidents.

Director Hani does not exist in this film, because (to me) he has none of the personalised traits subtle-emotional directors of today seem to achieve, not that a new and honest film maker shouldn't be let loose to create an impression, and in this film he certainly has; but of the man himself there is very little.

India's Ray, and in part James Ivory, in particular, I feel are two of the greatest and their work compares beautifully with this. One can feel their brooding soft countenance behind their images rather than cameras; their pliably slow climaxes, an eternal element, as if we had fallen asleep at birth and are awakened suddenly to find everything in order and right and continuing along as we expected. The delicate grey and white exposures in She and He and the opaque quietude of many of the conversations are unbelievable in their direct honesty. They are ravishingly pure, and very very sad.

It needs a fuller report to do this film justice; there should be occasions for anyone interested in films to see it, and discuss it. If we could guarantee an interest, (any light by any one to go by), it would not be impossible to secure the film from the Federation and Show it sometime at Varsity.

It is disgusting the minority that have seen it.

* * *

The Film Society's offering this week is John Frankenheimer's horror masterpiece Seconds which was first seen in Wellington last year. The film marks Frankenheimer at his best in technical horror and is guaranteed to send small shudders if you haven't seen it before. Screening 12.15 on Friday lunchtime.