On Screen

...and those who have, an occasional pleasant reminder of something in the novel...

...A trio of adaptations provides my text for today...

...Most disconcerting is Natasha Pyne in the crucial role of Bianca...

...Persona I shall have to see again in order to do it justice, and must relegate writing about to the next time around...

...But ridiculous is the word for the whole enterprise??not funny, and certainly not moving...

...Orson Welles in Falstaff (or Chimes at Midnight), on the other hand, has tried to surround himself with nothing but dazzlers— regardless of whether Marina Vlady, as a dubbed Kate Percy, and Jeanne Moreau, as an undubbed Doll Tear-sheet, are dragged in by their lovely hair and made to look misplaced, insignificant, and ridiculous...

...If Zeffirelli's idiosyncrasy is fancy production values and disrespect for the work of art, Elizabeth Taylor's is godawful acting...

...And what awful direction...

...And, I submit, a session of the University of Padua, a fat Paduan courtesan disporting herself, and a bedeviled priest at the wedding camping it up are not something better...

...The camera work of Edmond Richard is arty to a fault, though the fault may as easily be Welles...

...Besides writing all those superb Fellini scores, Rota has composed some splendid ones for Clement (This Angry Age) and Visconti (Rocco and His Brothers...

...or shamelessly overacting like Victor Spinetti...

...Norman Rodway is a lumpish Hotspur and Keith Baxter a lumpen Hal??but why go on...

...But to have to pay $5.50 for an aide-memoire is an outrage...

...This bit of rough-hewn bonhomie is worked so heavily by Burton (and later by other members of the cast to whom it apparently spread) that were all specimens of it cut from the film, this Shrew might be a good??no, a bad quarter of an hour shorter...

...To make the film more accessible, almost every "difficult" reference has been omitted...

...The camera seems to have been entrusted only to operators who are Shakers...

...Hotspur's farewell to his wife, a movingly restrained scene, is completely ruined by repeated crosscutting to a bunch of bleating trumpeters on the ramparts...

...The rather amusing Sly the Tinker framework was first to go in the general tinkering...

...Zeffirelli, with his usual preference for recreating "the Renaissance atmosphere" at the expense of everything else, has chosen to give us lavishly animated canvases by Veronese, that champion of pictorial license and spiritual ancestor of Zeffirelli...

...ON SCREEN By John Simon With Divine Ambition Puffed The good news in the world of film is that Ingmar Bergman reasserts his mastery with his magnificent Persona and that Peter Watkins' The War Game is finally being distributed...

...Morris is one of the finest photographers at work in Europe today, albeit much less highly touted than some of his Continental confreres...

...Bloom's and Stephen's father-son relationship is almost entirely lost...

...Commenting on Beerbohm-Tree's defense of Garrick's version of The Taming of the Shrew, Bernard Shaw observed that it was "either an artistic misdemeanor or a profession of Philistinism...

...One can be revolted bv its antifeminism...

...and there are more bed and toilet scenes (the shooting, happily, is over the privy door, not under) than you can shake a brush at...

...The Taming of the Shrew is one of Shakespeare's least interesting plays, but given a good production such as Peter Hall's at the English or Michael Langham's at the Canadian Stratford, it can still divert us in its simple-minded way...

...The once pretty face has become coarse, though from a distance it can still look good??but only if it avoids any attempt at expression, as, to be sure, it not infrequently does...

...by which a tough nut of a girl is cracked by a fellow who is even tougher and nuttier...

...No amount of pious invoking of Joyce's name can disguise the fact that a cheaply produced film is being sold at exorbitant prices so that someone can make his boodle off "culture...

...It may be that Strick, through sheer lack of imagination, betrayed and raped it less completely...

...even Bloom is translated into basic English, and Molly's monologue loses a good deal by being fully acted out rather than a luscious verbal tapestry for the eye and inner ear...

...These bustling tableaus are occasionally interrupted by plot, but even then only by the plot as accommodated to Zeffirelli's or the Burtons' idiosyncrasies...

...Thus the Boar's Head Inn is turned into a whorehouse, with numerous scantily clad bawds forming a kind of Aristophanic chorus to whatever goes on...

...Shoddy as it is, even the generally acceptable performances cannot make it much of a film in its own right...

...But just how garish her commonplace accent, squeakily shrill voice, and the childish petulance with which she delivers her lines are, my pen is neither scratchy nor leaky enough to convey...

...Aside from a red beard that fits in with the predominantly reddish-tawny set and costume design, Burton's chief dramatic contribution is a somewhat manic laugh, really a sort of tic halfway between a giggle and a snarl...

...In any case, only a very crude sensibility could conceive of taking bits and pieces out of this enormous and difficult book, stringing them together talis qualis, and calling the whole thing either an illumination of the original or a tribute to its author...

...But a line is left in that, as delivered by Burton, takes on new significance...

...Only Margaret Rutherford as Mistress Quickly and Ralph Richardson as the narrator come out ahead of the game, but she is barely on screen, and he entirely off...

...plot and a few good lines are almost all there is, and you had best stick to that unless you can come up with something better...

...with Shakespeare's language, even somewhat modernized as it is here, she is at a total loss??we actually hear her say "Whom dost thou lovest best...

...Alan Webb's Shallow is just as schematic as was his Gremio in the Shrew...

...About The War Game I have already written, and I only urge you now not to miss it...

...Granted, there is some visual excitement in the cleverly designed sets, in Danilo Donati's gaily turbulent costumes (though not in Irene Sharaf's overwrought ones for the two principals) and, above all, in Oswald Morris' distinctive color photography...

...To make it conform to present tastes, the sex angle has been broadened (e.g., the masturbation in the Nausicaa sequence) but the anti-Catholicism discreetly soft-pedaled (though one or two token blasphemies have been preserved for prestige purposes...

...Here we are treated to the obverse: Instead of the customarily weary and sullen Burton, we get an infantile, bellowing, guffawing boor, a cross between Jack the Ripper and Jack the Giant Killer...

...Whenever possible, both he and Keith Baxter, the extremely plebeian Prince Hal...

...which must not be done uncharmingly and ineptly, but for which Miss Pyne seems to have been chosen expressly to provide Miss Taylor with the least competition, thespian or visual...

...Holy Rollers, or, preferably, whirling dervishes, and what with the cast running off simultaneously in all directions and the camera in several others??well, it beats the roller coaster any time...

...Richard Burton tends to give cleverly externalized performances in which a nice overlay of melancholy is shot through by flashes of something or other...

...film of the Shrew manages to be both: Zeffirelli's misdemeanor and the Burtons' philistinism...

...Typical of the film is the wanton cutting of one of the two or three most famous lines of the play, "And for your love to her, lead apes in hell...

...by having Harry take a bath through much of it and even running to the door, losing his towel and being caught bare-arsed, and by playing the end of it in a whirl of men galloping away, with Harry's voice coming from between the hind parts of rampaging horses...

...Thus there is a battle scene (effective but quite extraneous) that takes place in three different kinds of weather at once??sunny, overcast, and foggy...

...Disappointing, too, is a supporting cast full of good actors either miscast like Cyril Cusack...

...It is rather like a highminded comic-strip version of Stephen Hero or Dub-liners, and on the few occasions when a bit of genuine Joycean complexity is allowed to survive in the midst of all that jolly, naturalistic Irishry, it strikes one as self-conscious and out of place...

...most of the Bianca subplot went next...

...What I truly do mind is Welles' self-indulgent Falstaff??mumbling, showily underplayed, sliding along surfaces, reveling in coyness, and speaking with an unattractive Midwestern accent into which he introduces??when he remembers??an occasional broad "a...

...go into whispers, which they think highly cinematic, but which are only inverse hamminess...

...The filmmaker can either pedestrianly transpose whatever is literally transpos-able or invent daring cinematic equivalents...

...Its chief purpose, I imagine, is to give those who haven't read the book (whether or not they can follow the film) an excuse for never reading it...

...If ever a novel demanded to be left alone by the adapters, Ulysses is it...

...What is required, though, is a better actor and director than Welles is now, and less of a shoestring production...

...Fritz Mueller's editing is frenetic, with the ends and even beginnings of speeches often neatly apocopated...

...Now, it's no use saying the plot of the Shrew is not much anyway...

...Only the bosom keeps implacably marching on??or down, as the case may be ??but I do not feel qualified to be the Xenophon of this reverse anabasis...

...There is probably no harm in fusing the Falstaff material from three Shakespearean plays (not five, as Judith Crist would have it) into a film where the fat knight becomes the foreground and English history the background??the two are equally colossal and equally absurd...

...it is comparable only to Giovanni Fusco's for La Guerre est finie in its unat-tractiveness and inappositeness...

...Its beauties and meaning lie almost exclusively in its form: in its musical interweaving of themes, in its cerebral texture of allusions and parallels, in its linguistic constructs, and, not the least, in its typographical appearance...

...The direction, I repeat, is much to blame...

...As for Alberto Lavagnino's music (a thoroughly international production, this...

...and, finally, a good deal of the main plot...

...Nino Rota's score is a disappointment...

...with the Renaissance, however, he is clearly not in tune...

...Never mind the flagrantly Spanish backgrounds, never mind the glaringly clumsy lip synchronization (almost every speech seems to be delivered by off-screen voices), never mind even the synthetic, routine performance given by so distinguished an actor as John Gielgud, who, moreover, plays the aging warrior king as a flabby, aging queen...

...Joseph Strick's film adaptation of Ulysses is earnest, deferential, old-fashioned and plodding...

...But rape, like virginity, is not easily divisible??it is, in fact, quite Kierkegaardian in its either/ or...

...The photography is consistently second-rate, the music dull, the direction unimaginative...

...The secondary characters are thinned out to shadows, and even an episode that is relatively uncut, such as the nighttown sequence, is vulgarized down from a surrealist Walpurgisnacht to a series of burlesque skits reminiscent of Strick's appalling movie of The Balcony...

...and with two kinds of ground??ard and dry for cavalry charges, and deeply muddy for footsoldiers to wallow and croak in...

...What he has done here is not only delicious in itself but also remarkable in its faithful recreation of Veronese's palette...

...Either way, the particular grandeur of the novel is betrayed...

...Walter Chiari's Silence is turned here, inappropriately and diminishingly, into a near-cretinous stutterer...

...Not even the topography of Dublin, so vivid in the book, survives, and the movements and crisscrossings of the characters, so scrupulously worked out by Joyce, become jerky, arbitrary, incomprehensible...

...was the one unmistakably genuine moment in the entire film...

...Miss Taylor has a hard enough time of it with contemporary speech...

...Stephen, who in the novel is all intellectual stream of consciousness, is here reduced to being hardly more than a bit part...

...It has only one point to make: the elementary psychology??or is it sheer bullying...

...Neither is Burton's levee, in all its blustering detail...

...I nominate her Katharina for a place of honor in the Hall of Histrionic Infamy...

...or wax nostalgic about the good old days when men were men and women slaves, but one must, in either case, get some sense of the parabola of the rough-and-ready plot, of the un-classic but sharp profile of the action...

...To make the film less expensive to produce, it has been updated, so that all the Celtic Twilight and Irish revolutionism had to be dropped, and much that is left (like the references to England's being taken over by the Jews) is out of keeping...

...Franco Zeffirelli's and the Burtons' (or is it the Taylors...

...Petruchio announces that, as long as she is rich, he will marry this Kate: "Be she as foul as was Florentius' love,/ As old as Sibyl, and as curst and shrewd . . ." Burton's embarrassment as he scooted over that line (why was it kept in, when better ones bit the dust...

...the Homeric parallels, entirely, and with them the mythic, universal quality of the work...