THE SCREEN:
Jr, Colin L Westerbeck
THE SCREEN
Where drama brings the pimple of life to a head, comedy pops it. The technique of the one is to concentrate our attention, the technique of the other is to dissipate it. Nowhere are these...
...Film comedy at its best tends to make the situations it depicts abstract...
...The camera in Conduct Unbecoming is forever rolling in for a tight, emphatic close-up that focuses the action and frames out all distractions...
...Perhaps the reason this film seems more effective than Conduct Unbecoming is that the observation itself is now so cliche, the only reaction we can have to it is to laugh...
...First there's Lola Montes (Florinda Balkan), who goes after Flashman with a hair brush...
...The result is that we are sometimes left with a wide screen full of nothing but extraordinary Bavarian scenery beautifully photographed, and nothing will kill a comedy quicker than this sort of visual lushness...
...In a scene that takes place in the court of Franz Josef, for instance, Flashman and Lola are strolling about a ballroom in the foreground...
...I don't want to give the impression that Royal Flash is too funny, however, because it isn't...
...The Priapus in Royal Flash is Lt...
...The only thing Lester can do to get around this problem is make his films into enough of a three-ring circus-front, side and back ground all going at once-that the realism will be offset...
...As Flashman and Lola walk back and forth, giving the appearance of polite conversation but in fact compounding seduction with intrigue, the game of musical chairs behind them becomes rougher and rougher...
...As much as any alteration of character, though, the way that Royal Flash makes a joke out of what Conduct Unbecoming takes so seriously is by diffusing, and thus de-fusing, its social drama...
...Flashman (Malcolm McDowell), who is billed as being "the greatest swordsman of them all," which is precisely what the unknown hero of Conduct Unbecoming was, in a more literal but equally Freudian way, supposed to be...
...With four musketeers at his disposal, this was possible...
...But Lester's camera keeps its distance, and after a minute or two we are much less absorbed in them than in a game of musical chairs that is going on in the background...
...Actually, as I was saying two weeks ago, there's far more variety to the film's style than that...
...Conduct Unbecoming's sanctimonious and suspenseful treatment of this idea about nineteenth-century society- as if the idea were, like the ending of the film's courtroom drama, a revelation-just won't play any more...
...Since he is now trying to make slapstick comedy himself, Lester works in long shot much of the time as well...
...A voice ever so calm and decorous remarks to a companion, "You've crushed my foot...
...As his love life with the at first Nordic and chilly Irma goes to show, like every Richard Lester hero, Flashman has the Knack...
...Sometimes, instead of having the camera crawl towards the actors, Conduct Unbecoming's director has the actors crawl toward the camera...
...Part of the reason is that, great swordsman or not, Flashman is usually on the defensive with women...
...In large measure, what makes any situation funny on film is this abstracting process...
...His Knack is contagious, like a social disease, and he gives every woman whom he comes in contact with a rabid case of it...
...The idea has been around so long it can only be fodder for comedy now...
...THE SCREEN Where drama brings the pimple of life to a head, comedy pops it...
...But in Royal Flash Lester is less successful...
...He can't contrive something as good as that game of musical chairs quite often enough...
...But because Lester's film backs off a bit from this observation, and allows it to break in willy-nilly, it makes the matter laughable...
...This is unfortunate since the three musketeers and the ten commandments don't add up to a lucky number...
...The view of nineteenth-century society implicit in all this is really much the same as that taken by Conduct Unbecoming...
...This was most apparent in silent comedy, where all the things that divorced the situation from reality, including the absence of color as well as sound, were what allowed the catastrophes befalling the hero to be comic instead of tragic...
...Both films are set in the nineteenth century in the polite society of, primarily, the officer classes, and the message in both is that propriety in those golden days was forever being raped or ravished by some self-prepossessing Priapus...
...In Royal Flash, on the other hand, the camera is constantly pulling back and back to disclose more of the setting for the action and allow in as much distraction as possible...
...And it was for much the same reason-to keep us at a detached,' laughable distance-that they worked in long shot much of the time too...
...AFTER DALLAS)ER DALLAS...
...It goes against the grain...
...In order to make the action still more remote from real human behavior, the slapstick directors learned to undercrank their films, thus producing a fast-motion effect...
...Finally Princess Irma (Britt Eckland) goes after poor Flashman when von Bismarck forces him to marry her for political reasons...
...His problem is How to Get Rid of It...
...But today the film he must use is such a sensitive color stock that it saturates with unwanted realism all that background and side ground encompassed by his technique...
...Beneath the genteel civility the beast was always lurking...
...But the fact is, as I was saying, that Flashman is really a much lighter dragoon than his Unbecoming counterpart...
...Then there's Lola Montes, when she goes after him again, but this time with some swordsmen of her own supplied by Otto von (Continued on page 595) Bismarck (Oliver Reed...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...It doesn't come up to Lester's Three and Four Musketeers, for example, because Flashman is only one musketeer, which makes it difficult for Lester to fill the screen with the sort of helter-skelter the earlier films had...
...Because it's done in long shot, film comedy like this has become a kind of unwitting inheritor of the production values fostered by the old Hollywood spectacular of the fifties...
...Being better than Conduct Unbecoming doesn't make it great...
...Nowhere are these maxims more amply demonstrated than in the film I was discussing last time, Conduct Unbecoming, and Richard Lester's new film, Royal Flash...
...The music continues to be courtly and the pace of the players' rotation ceremonious, but each time the music stops loud bumps, thuds, crunches and groans arise from the scramble for seats...
Vol. 102 • December 1975 • No. 19
