On Screen

...as a film-maker, he seems hopeless The Shameless Old Lady was saved by Sylvie, Al-lio's wife, Malka Ribovska, couldn't save a kitten from drowning, and certainly not a dud like The Other One A play-withm-the-film shows a production of Uncle Vanya, with such excellent actors as Philippe Noiret and Claude Dauphin, and I kept unsuccessfully trying to will the Chekhov into swallowing up the Alho Far from Vietnam, a collaboration by six film-makers (one of them, you guessed it Godard') is a clumsy piece of agit-prop anti-Amencana, but it has its points of interest, viz Jons Ivens' views of embattled North Vietnam, infected though they were with prettifying distortion For all my hatred of the Vietnam war, I do not readily respond to tendentious oversimplification Another double bill of documentaries consisted of the Canadian Donald Brittam's Memorandum, an often effective reportage about some concentration camp survivors revisiting their former places of torture, and of The Lion Hunters, a truly ghastly film by Jean Rouch In it, a group of abysmal African hunters, with bone-mangling steel traps and poisoned arrows, hunt down in the most craven and pain-lnflictmg fashion lions that show intelligence, courage, and nobility far beyond that of the mumbo-jumbo-mumbling tools who inhumanly kill them Rouch thinks that these black hunters are the dying remnants of an ancient chivalnc order, in their program notes, the festival directors call the film an "epic poem " If that be chivalry and that epic poetry, the sooner both of them are totally extinct, the better...

...Its Russian title, A Mother's Heart, rightly suggests not Turgenev or Lawrence, but the tear-jerkmg Ed-uardo de Armas In the Special Showings, I also caught a few documentaries, among which The Titicut Follies seemed thought-provoking, and Wairendale and Eveiy Seventh Child required viewing...

...Crazy Quilt There is no telling whether Korty, for all his talents as a cartoonist and still photographer, has m him the stuff of a cinematog-rapher and film-maker By the way, I am getting heartily sick of films that switch from full color to various monochromes??yellow, blue, green, etc ??or no apparent reason except perhaps to save money while still seeming colorful Wajda, Le-louch, and now Korty have done it, and it doesn't work for any of them It did work, to some extent, for Abel Gance, who, however, used single tints with a meaning??say, red for revolutionary slaughter??in a film like Napoleon (1923-27), which was shown as part of a Gance retrospective I saw only a fraction of this four-hour silent Leviathan, which, like all beached whales, has a certain ludicrous pathos A piece of apocryphal hagiography (incidents based on tact have captions at the bottom of which the abbreviation "Hist " appears??and it appears less and less frequently as the film progresses), it has intermittent spurts of invention, and lusciousness in the mise en scene But Gane??as two other films of his I caught in the Special Events screenings confirm??as essentially a vigorous hack, whose frentic overindulgence in longitude and multitude is the movie buffs' dehght A good many frames of Napoleon might have more aptly borne the caption 'Hyst Masaki Kobayashi's new film, Rebellion, is inferior to his Harakm (itself a flawed though impressive work) but still has much to recommend it This is yet another movie in which Toshiro Mifune pits his swordsmanship triumphantly against more blades than there are blades of grass, but the final mayhem, as in so many Japanese films and so few westerns, is artistic as well as absurd And the slow-paced inner struggles that lead up to the cathartic bloodletting are not without a stately beauty of rhythm, a dignity that manages to be as dainty as it is grave The photography, in and out of doors, is incisive enough to clutch at the heart no less than at the eye...

...From the London scene to the typical festival scene??for what festival would be complete without at least two films by Godard...

...Rene Alho may be, as I hear, a good set designer...

...Young American film-making was represented by John Korty's Funnyman, and there is something so amiable about the film and so likable about its maker that I wish 1 could summon up some praise It is the story of a comedian acting with San Francisco's "Committee," and shows his tribulations on and off stage as he tries to make money, good, and girls Peter Bonerz, who really is with "The Committee," has some amusing moments with ad executives, cartoonists, and just himself, but the script, by him and Korty, gets nowhere slow The resolution??the restorative love of a Good Woman, here in the guise, or guiselessness, of a nude model??is patently naive, a quality that was in evidence also in Korty's previous film...

...I did not see two revivals from the Hollywood of 1929, Applause and Show People, I leave the unearthing of such neglected non-masterpieces to the Camp followers who so abundantly deserve them Nor did I see Shirley Clarke's Portion of Jason 100-minute outpourings of a drug-and-dnnk-sodden, goaded and taunted Negro male whore strike me not as cinema ver-ite (itself banal enough) but as egregious lack of cinema charite But I did see Mark Donskoi's platitudinous and archaic tribute to Lenin's mother, Sons and Mothers...

...The companion piece, The Benefit of the Doubt, proved dreary It is the filmed record of Peter Brook's production of US, the anti-Vietnam war improvisation by the Royal Shakespeare Company, interspersed with actors' comments on their roles US was a lumpish enough affair, but actors pontificating about their work surpasses everything in fatuity and dullness Still, Richard Peaslee's tunes and Adrian Mitchell's lyrics have their moments??but no thanks to anything Whitehead has done in this plodding documentary...

...Age of Illusions, augured well for its then 26-year-old maker It was full of Truf-faut, but fertilized rather than fettered by him In its most memorable scene, the young lovers watch newsreels of recent Hungarian history??war, aftermath, Communism, revolution, counterrevolution ?and comment on it all detachedly, or talk about quite other matters, including a friend who escaped to America and is doing nicely there In Father, the Truffaut technique of creative horseplay reappears A boy growing up in postwar Budapest invents breakneck daredeviltries his father is supposed to have performed in peace and in war among the partisans We hear about the real father, a decent deceased surgeon, but see his fantasy feats, as we also see the boy showing off with and profiting by this dead hero-father Gradually, the boy grows into a courageous and capable young man who can now bury the fictitious father as well There are fetching scenes in the film, though they are not the bravura set pieces, rather, they are bits like the one in which three grade-school kids grapple with the concept that the father of one of them is an escaped count, and that the son is considered an "enemy of the party " This conversation, splendidly managed by the author-director and the children presents their incomprehension of political claptrap as charmingly sensible, and heralding the day when humanity may transcend ideology...

...Here we had an old one, Les Carabiniers (1962), and a new one, Made in USA (1966) My contempt and distaste tor Godard are so great that I cannot do justice to them m an omnibus review I therefore beg the reader's indulgence for referring him to my essay, "Godard and the God-ardians" (in Private Screenings, just published by Macmillan), where I set forth in some detail just what is so deleterious and despicable about Godard and his vogue I hope that those concerned will take the trouble to look up this piece...

...Peter Whitehead (when will a new British director not be a man called Peter'') was represented by a brace of documentaries, The London Scene, stuck together back to back, and quite uncomfortable The first, Tonite Let's All Make Love in London, assembles a mosaic of the swinging life, pop and proto-pop interviews with the famous, glimpses of the obscure There is everything from Vanessa Redgrave leading a protest group in a North Vietnamese song she sings with quivering authenticity, to Edna O'Brien and Michael Came pronouncing on the new sexual mores, there are speculations on art and life from the head of the Rolling Stones and a painter who paints on naked girls, turning them into a hot of strolling tones There are also hauntingly surieal, off-focus slow-motion color shots of a writhing discotheque, but these are dragged out a bit I don't know whether London is truly so sedulously swinging, and, if so, whether that makes it a pendulum abreast of the time or a hanged man in his death throes, but a mood is captured here, graphically and with unusual variety...

...Let me say here only that both the above films are vintage Godard, which is to say pretentious nonsense in full bloom But I cannot resist quoting John Coleman, the film critic of The New Statesman, with whom 1 am m full agreement on this matter "If anyone else tries to tell me that Godard represents the new intellectual cinema as opposed to the draggy old one (which somehow managed to accommodate creators like Renoir) I shall do a damage Only a period in thrall to adolescence, in its publicized form a product of commercial astuteness, could so doggily roll over and bark at such permissive nonsense...

...Another effective scene has the hero as a young man strenuously swimming across the Danube by way of a singularly valorous iite de passage Almost at his goal, he looks back, only to see the heads of all his male??and female??chums bobbing merrily and casually right behind him...

...The acting is consistently good, and I particularly liked Dam Erdelyi as the boy unpathetic and uncute, a child's child...