On Screen

...The hero's loss of wife and child and subsequent renunciation of music and the outside world, his final bid to outdo his neighbor with a grandiose musical evening at the cost of his last remnants of money, sanity and life—all this has validity, especially as Chekhov might have written it in a short story...

...There is the moment when the old aristocrat, well played by Chabi Biswas, catches sight of his decaying self in the dusty, grimy mirror of his abandoned music room...

...the problem, as Pater clearly saw, is "how shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy...

...Where nirvana is the condition to aspire to, where quietism, denial of the self, submergence of the individual in eternity are the order of the day, the day becomes unimportant—to say nothing of the hour or the minute...

...Presently a truck comes chugging down the road...

...And he concludes: "The old King had been in the hands, whatever happened to him, of the great English poet, of William Shakespeare...

...But such scenes are very few...

...Unless a film is precisely an analysis of boredom, and a cogent one at that, we will not countenance dullness for a minute...

...But to the enlightened Westerner it is the moment that is of supreme importance...

...Our enthusiasm for Indian literature, for instance, seems at best voulu, and at worst phoney...

...The photography, repudiating the juste milieu, manages to be almost always over- or underexposed...

...But here the camera maunders and meanders while some quite able actors are allowed only one-dimensional portrayals and rudimentary dialogue...

...ON SCREEN By John Simon Keeping Up With Jones The poet Andrew Young, in a bucolic lyric, speaks of losing a contest with the river Stour: "I knew I lost the race—/ I could not keep so slow a pace...

...Tony Richardson, the director, has rightly been likened by Robert Brustein to an English Elia Kazan...

...The later films can be characterized only as the world of oh, pooh...

...Waters in which, by means of suggestively shaped comestibles and their still more suggestive mode of consumption, a long night's journey into sex is acted out, going from temporary impotence through various stages to fellatio and cunnilingus...

...The most beautiful umbilical panorama (whether by Satyajit Ray or Alain Resnais) cannot make up for a single misspent moment of our film-going—or of our lives...

...What gets in the way of even simple somatic enjoyment is the furibund pace, often maintained at hysterical pitch with the most frenetic assortment of bustle, hubbub, camera movement and feverish cutting...

...soon we, too, are engulfed in the dusty stagnancy of the film...

...The person who could have beaten the Stour with unseemly ease is the Indian film-maker Satyajit Ray...

...And that is the great shortcoming of the film...

...in large, crude lettering, the vehicle is inscribed with the name of the old man's bête noire, the thriving, arriviste moneylender...

...Obviously a film that elicits such lyric ejaculations from the reviewers cannot be all good...

...Yet, oddly enough, some scenes go on too long and become wearying...

...As for the dancing, to one who does not know a mudra from a raga, it offers little...

...222 years ago Fielding published his Shamela, a parody of Samuel Richardson's Pamela...

...It is as if the camera had become a method actor...

...John Osborne's script concentrates, first, on the salacious elements in Fielding, and, secondly, on the more obvious social satire...

...But a touching moment here, a fetching effect there, do not constitute a film...

...Father Panchaii, to be sure, had considerable poignancy, some fine photography and sympathetically observed people in it...

...The story of a proud, old aristocrat who has wasted his money on musical soirees, who clings to cumbersome traditions and despises his neighbor, the rich, up-to-date parvenu, has possibilities...

...And that is the feeling of the reader of Tom Jones: I am in the hands of Henry Fielding, artist and gentleman, and I am, even in the cesspool, enchantedly, enchantingly safe...

...This does not mean, as we shall see, that a film should profligately hurtle ahead, debasing the currency of movement...

...Ah, you will tell me, I'm being parochial...

...With the exception of Susannah York's Sophia, a mere assortment of poses and moues, and the cruelly miscast David Tomlinson's Fellamar, the performances are funny, often excellent, down to the last extra...

...To a large extent, Oriental philosophy is to blame...

...Why can't I transport myself into another culture, another mentality...

...What Fielding wrote was "a comic epic poem in prose...

...The film is comic enough, and decidedly prose...

...To give only one example: Thwackum and Square, far from being satires on distinct but equally reprehensible types of religious and moral attitudinizing, become interchangeable vaudeville villains...

...what we must mind is that we are not in the film qua film in the presence of a commanding intellect serving up vital truth in a subtle sauce of style...

...But neither can it, as in The Music Room, embalm itself into an odoriferous stasis...

...This is the way with much of Tom Jones...

...Acting areas are severely limited, other locations appear only as evanescent interpolations, and there is no fluidity of motion to unite them into topographical reality...

...Hailed prematurely and irresponsibly as a genius on the basis of his Apu (pronounced "Opu") trilogy, he should since have persuaded all but the Zen Masters and MysteriousEast worshipers in our midst that he is fast becoming the maker of the slowest movies in the world...

...I say odoriferous because the film has its moments of perfumed charm...

...It is to stuff it full to bursting with every kind of kinesthesis, noise, trickery until it explodes in our faces...

...Having scuttled eschatology and risen above resurrection, most Westerners have traded in a fictitious marriage to eternity for a passionate embrace of the moment, fleeting but real...

...Lost, however, is all of that gracious irony, that magnanimous geniality, that vast expanse of verbiage which, so far from boring the reader, gives him ever the sense of being in the presence of a delightful, prolix, mischievous, humane man—the author...

...One's eyes and ears frequently fall behind, yearning for a respite...

...A surfeit, too, is the already celebrated eating scene between Tom and Mrs...

...As the old man watches, the dust cloud from the truck engulfs more than the elephant: a world of memories, a way of life...

...Still, I cannot but feel that we are witnessing the Revenge of the Richardsons...

...Never mind that it is an adaptation of a great novel and cannot help losing much in the transposition...

...The fact is, Tom Jones is fun...

...Another way of assaulting the dignity of the moment is the opposite of letting it die of inanition...

...What adds to our exhaustion is the use of devices and more devices: imitation silent-movie sequences, stop shots, jump shots, acceleration—anything you can name, often used recurrently, with much the same effect as a fancy word appearing twice in the same paragraph...

...but one had the feeling that Ray was the filmic equivalent of the homo unius libri who has poured all of his gifts into one work which contains them snugly, with nothing left over...

...A fable like Shakuntala is exquisite, but can any intelligent Westerner relish the vaporous effusions of a Rabindranath Tagore...

...For this alone the movie is worth seeing...

...If Newton could have seen Devi, Two Daughters, or The Music Room, how it would have facilitated his discovery of the principle of inertia...

...What was it, wonders the hero of Isak Dinesen's "The Poet," that "had made King Lear so exceptionally safe, so that even the storm on the heath, and even all the wickedness in the world, could not harm him in the least...

...we shall not forsake the integrity of narrative movement for endless minutes of cinematic navel-gazing...

...The latter parts of the Apu trilogy merely plucked the same string with diminishing returns...

...If entertainment is all you want from a film, it is there in plenty, though not unalloyed...

...or that other one, when he emerges after years of seclusion to look at the ancient elephant his dead son had loved...

...The other scenes, too, have their built-in obsolescence...

...There are a few small jewels in the big, sagging lotus of The Music Room...

...Now, to avenge his putative forebear, Tony Richardson gives us this caricature of Tom Jones...

...It is, in fact, trivial...

...The elephant is facing away from the camera and is further diminished by distance, decrepitude, and the deteriorating lands around him...

...Because there is something artificial about espousing an outlook that cannot convince one of its validity...

...This is certainly obscene and even quite funny, but it is drawn out well beyond the point of the joke...

...only in Walter Lassally's marvelously downy, velvety, opalescent photography is it a poem, and in no way is it epic...

...Once in a while a movie comes along that makes poets of our reviewers, and their ballpoints in a fine frenzy rolling sprout pure rhymes like "brawling, sprawling" (Judith Crist), slant rhymes like "rowdy, bawdy" (Jesse Zunser) and even rhyming pairs like "roisterous, boisterous uproarious and glorious" (Justin Gilbert...

...The highlights of the film are three well-nigh interminable musical numbers which consist chiefly of a lugubrious plunk-plonk-boing on the instruments (continuing with subliminal variations as the background music of the entire film) and a cross between bleating and croaking from the vocal cords...

...Yet it is precisely Tagore who was Ray's mentor and the source of Devi and Two Daughters, which, despite an isolated felicity in the latter, are two of the dreariest films ever...

...there are times when you wish you could buy, as on certain juke boxes, five minutes' silence...

...There is a fox hunt, beautifully staged and photographed, that ends up being the animated equivalent of a mighty collection of 18th-century prints (as are a few other scenes), and a surfeit...

...More serious, however, is the betrayal of the novel...