THE SCREEN
Jr, Colin L Westerbeck
CINEMA UNBECOMING THE SCREEN Conduct Unbecoming is a film about honor that is itself dishonest. It is a film in which collaboration between the filmmaker and playwright becomes a conspiracy...
...She has accused him of being the man who assaulted her on the night of the regimental ball...
...Even as she gives her testimony at the trial, there is something disquieting, something inconsonant and contrary, about it...
...Though the angle again suggests the victim's point of view, the expression on this man's face, unlike the sneering, vicious expression Mrs...
...Millington (James Faulkner...
...When she recovers her composure, she also accuses the entire regiment of being brutes whose sport, way of life and martial ethic have fostered the attack on her...
...In the position of attacker, he now becomes the victim instead, his senses assaulted by the sight before him...
...Their design all along, it now turns out, has been to make the existence of these men's honor that much more dramatic and emphatic by revealing it in the very midst of the depravity which the attack on Mrs...
...This third shot is intended as an apology for the attack on Mrs...
...Somehow, though, the logic of this explanation escapes me...
...England and Anderson are ultimately hoist on the point they themselves are trying to make about honor...
...So saying, she storms out of both the trial and the movie, and hers really should be the last word here because she is obviously right...
...Scarlett (Susannah York) has been called to testify at the court-martial of Lt...
...What she reveals is that her molester forced her to crawl about on all fours while he went after her hindquarters with a saber...
...As they finally catch up with the pig that night and have at it with their swords, we see that from the victim's point of view, too...
...Scarlett is a kind of transition between the earlier low-angle shot of the officers at play and another low-angle shot of the officer -the guilty party, who proves not to be Millington- at work soldiering...
...On the contrary, the film, which is adapted from England's stage hit, is very artful at times...
...Though she is acting out how she was attacked by a man, we feel more as if we are being attacked by her...
...In other words, her dramatic role in the movie, like her function in the male society the movie depicts, is to be the sacrificial goat-the effigy dragged across the proscenium that these men might rehearse their prowess at its expense...
...This is not to say that playwright Barry England and director Michael Anderson are not in control of their material...
...As Mrs...
...Theirs is the kind of artfulness intended to obscure rather than reveal, and art that tries to pass off confusion and deception in place of the ambiguity that genuinely inheres in human experience...
...This is the scene in which Mrs...
...Scarlett becomes so distraught at recounting this incident, quite understandably, that she begins acting the incident out-crawling on all fours before the court as she was made to do that night...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...and so the transformation of guilt to innocence, indictment to exoneration and disgrace to restored honor is complete...
...Scarlett, crawling towards us, looms up above the camera, she appears to us more threatening than threatened...
...Repeating his words, her face is so contorted and ugly that it arouses our dislike for her almost as much as for him whom she imitates...
...Scarlett wore, is a pitiful, cringing reaction to the atrocity he sees...
...Scarlett to be more specific about what happened...
...But England and Anderson are bullshit artists...
...This is true, for one thing, because she is playing both roles herself...
...Presumably, his having had to witness what one man did to another explains, and excuses, his attack on a woman...
...It is a film in which collaboration between the filmmaker and playwright becomes a conspiracy against women-the same sort of conspiracy that the Victorian code of officers and gentlemen which the film depicts was...
...Scarlett's re-enactment from the same point of view encourages us to transfer to her now the feelings we had about the officers then, thus confusing the distinction between attacker and victim further still...
...Although down on all -fours in the position of victim, she is speaking in the words of her attacker, who hissed, "Pig, pig" at her...
...Drake (Michael York), having been saddled with the onerous duty of defending Millington, is showing such inexcusable bad taste as to take the duty seriously and ask Mrs...
...As it happens, this shot of Mrs...
...Scarlett represents...
...and now Lt...
...This is a sport very popular in the regiment, except that the victim is customarily a stuffed effigy of a pig drawn on wheels through the mess with the regiment's youngbloods in hot pursuit...
...At the moment she is revealing the full extent of her victimization, the distinction between victim and attacker is beginning to blur in the film...
...The result is a failure not so much -of technique as of sensibility...
...The film's moment of greatest dishonesty is the one that is supposed to be its characters' moment of truth...
...But England and Anderson have other ideas...
...Or rather, its illogic lies lost beneath the trail of moral red herrings that Anderson's skulking camera has dragged across these people's story...
...Even the angle of the camera, which is pitched very low to the floor, seems to reinforce this contradictory impression...
...In point of fact, this is a camera angle we have seen before, when the officers are playing their pig-sticking game one night in the mess...
...To show us Mrs...
...Scarlett, and shows die man in question in the field viewing an atrocity committed against a fellow in arms...
Vol. 102 • November 1975 • No. 18
