Adaptations Ad Infinitum

...For the record, Miss York possesses a lovely bosom that stands up remarkably even lying down and deserves to be bared in a less barren film than The Killing of Sister George...

...One is the Hungarian art director Bela Zeichan, who helped Frankenheimer come up with interiors and exteriors (the latter in Hungary) that far better films might envy...

...Dalton Trumbo's lackluster screenplay pullulates with Jewishisms ("Luck I was always short of...

...The screen version expands the show—not back toward Dickens, but forward to greater make-believe and more sumptuous foolery...

...Each hypothesis can be refuted separately, but put them all together and they spell kitsch—unless, that is...

...John Franken-heimer's direction has skill in scenes like the initial pogrom, but lacks distinction in the subtler passages...

...is directed by Carol Reed, who did handsomely by it, even though this potent director of suspense films is hardly in his element here...

...Anthony Quinn and Michael Caine are out of place in a film emphasizing (however ineptly) the cerebral and spiritual, and Candice Bergen cannot act...

...Guy Green, the director, succeeds in making sententiousness visual as well as aural, and multivalence as fascinating as the multiplication table...

...Then, however, the supernatural is ostensibly rejected, and we are left with three possibilities: the hero was involved in an elaborate scheme by an avant-garde psychiatrist, or in a movie being shot by an unorthodox director, or he made up everything out of his tormented fantasy...

...The Magus concerns a series of odd incidents that occur to a callow English teacher on an Aegean island, incidents that seem at first enacted by a supernatural agency...

...Which leaves us with Anna Karina, and any film in which she can walk off with the acting honors is in serious trouble...

...Unlike Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet, to which you may take children but not adults, Oliver...

...From the world invented in the bbc studio at Shepherd's Bush to the June-Childie flat in Hampstead, the distance is measurable only in light years...

...Beryl Reid's performance as George has become much more schematized than it was on stage...

...The Magus tries to make much out of some lines from "Little Gidding" that it quotes: "We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time...

...The film also boasts the most unnecessary obligatory scene in film history: a bedroom bit between the Misses Browne and York in which the former, looking as if she were mentally reciting the Second Catilinian Oration, probes the latter's breast as though testing a particularly inscrutable cantaloupe for its ripeness...

...His bare posterior, known to us from Georgy Girl and King of Hearts, makes another timely appearance here, thus becoming one of the most exposed arses in cinematic annals...

...Billy Williams' color photography seems always overgrown with a thin film of greenish algae, and John Dankworth's score is banal...

...Still, even the musical numbers are shot with a briskness and verve characteristic of Reed...

...And in the end we are again coyly nudged toward the supernatural...

...Susannah York is unconvincing at everything: lesbianism, childishness, acting...

...If you know someone you want to start the new year as nauseated as possible, send him to see Candy...

...If he lets his head revolve and his eyes rove a trifle overmuch, who can blame him for casting about for a way out of the fix or Fixer he is in...

...Frank Marcus had written a blackish comedy about a foul-mouthed, gin-swilling, middle-aged actress, June Buckridge...

...the other is Marcel Grignon, who has photographed it all in rich, mellow, yet understated colors—as if a dark violet veil had been cast over the opulence...

...For a pit-bull terrier is easily the creepiest looking dog in existence, and whatever menace Oliver Reed may lack, that albino rat-faced, salamander-legged canine readily supplies...

...How much he contributed to films like Lolita, The Hill, and The Taming of the Shrew, we could properly estimate only if we could see these films without his camera work...

...The two have a sadomasochistic lesbian menage, which contrasts acridly with their outward lives, and particularly with the genteel Machiavellianism of the bbc potentates and the pathetic be-nightedness of the fans, whose mail and gifts keep pouring in...

...Morris has done more for cinematography and, being un-flashy, received fewer hosannahs than anyone I could name...

...Two people deserve special credit for the fine looks of the film, though all the visual aspects are commend-ably managed...

...Most of the performances are at least appropriate, and Ron Moody's Fagin is as definitive as a Bart-time Fagin can be...

...and "Childie...

...Thus when the sacked Sister George drunkenly smashes the studio equipment, instead of sympathizing with her, we find her mawkish and stupid, something she never was in the play...

...The film is not only zestfully atmospheric, it is also marvelously Moody...

...Once again there is an inspired set designer, John Box, who has created a many-hued, Mayhewish London that is real enough without being too real, and where all kinds of cavortings—choreographic, melodramatic, or just cornball—can feel at home...

...I knew the place before the film had half started, and consider it not worth exploring...

...There is, further, the color cinematography of Oswald Morris, one of the screen's devoted and complete artists...

...a superior shopgirl and balletomane, who plays with dolls and is June's mistress-slave, although she herself has an adolescent daughter somewhere...

...The Fixer is another adaptation that failed...

...The tunes continue to be sporadically ingratiating, the lyrics as spotty as a leopard with measles, the dances by Onna White less than imaginative but more than amiable...

...and the accents as well as the acting are a hodge-podge of everything from Central London to Central Casting...

...Maurice Jarre's score is not so good as what he has composed for small European films, but better than what he usually turns out for large Hollywood-sponsored ones...

...As an emetic, liquor is dandy, but Candy is quicker...

...The play ends with the double undoing of Sister George at the hands of an icily suave female bbc executive, who is instrumental in losing June her serial and ends up by stealing Childie as well...

...The only false note is Bill Sikes' dead body swinging back and forth on a rope—that is more in keeping with films like Odd Man Out and The Third Man than with this benign extravaganza...

...It takes more to create a successful set of levels of meaning than parading the first edition of Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity for the first time across a colored wide screen...

...The children all do well, though Mark Lester's Oliver seems at times a trifle too pale...

...but Coral Browne does make something impressive out of the sensible, steely, patronizing bbc crypto-tribade...

...Lionel Bart had applied his verbal and musical emollients to Oliver Twist and, with the help of some good performances and splendid sets by Sean Kenny, concocted a pleasant, unabrasive and undisturbing, stage musical...

...A much less happy adaptation is The Killing of Sister George...

...who portrays a jolly country nurse, Sister George, on a tv serial, and is the darling of British television viewers...

...Robert Aldrich and his scenarist Lukas Heller have turned this material into a crawling tear-jerker, the lines spoken at a speed adjusted to non-English or non-language-speaking audiences...

...The Magus is a pretentious, heavy-handed adaptation of a likewise pretentious book...

...A hero I'm not . . . Wise I never was," etc...

...I am told that Malamud's novel is far from what it might be, but I am sure that the film is considerably farther...

...The other supporting work ranges from the out and out ham of Hugh Griffith and Georgia Brown to the much more kosher performances of Ian Holm and William Hutt, with a unifying principle conspicuously absent...

...The sadism is omitted or turned into a joke, the "cultural" references are cut, the idiocy of the vast audience excised (for obvious reasons), the sauciness so reduced you can't tell whether it was bear-naise or hollandaise, and "humanizing" touches are added everywhere with thoroughly dehumanizing resuits...

...Oliver Reed is a somewhat lackadaisical and overre-fined Bill Sikes, and Shani Wallis is lumpish and insipid as Nancy, which is too bad...

...And Oliver...

...is suitable for everyone, at the very least for being the liveliest illustration of Dickens since Phiz, and providing in Ron Moody a truly fizzy Fagin...

...you believe in God's working in as mysterious and pretentious ways as this novel and screenplay by John Fowles...

...The most brilliant piece of casting has Sikes' dog enacted by a pit-bull terrier, with various cicatrices painted on in sheer redundancy...

...those who were able to finish it will have to pronounce it superior or inferior to the film...

...The extensive use of a solo string instrument is particularly effective...

...P.S...

...The play was second-rate, but with its nice blend of the homey and the chilling, the absurdist and the perverse, it had the quality of a Krafft-Ebing comic book...

...Dirk Bogarde, as the sympathetic investigating magistrate, gives an altogether intelligent, incisive, and charming performance, and any film that offers Bogarde a chance to display his enormous talent merits some attention...

...Had Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas been shown this sequence, it might have driven them screaming into hetero-sexuality...

...Some credit should perhaps be given a film from a major studio that dares to be incomprehensible, but the obscurities and ambiguities are more Malaprop than Mallarme...

...Alan Bates gives a creditable performance as a Cockneyfied Jew, and tries to infuse the unrelieved suffering exacted from the protagonist with as much variety as can be squeezed from pain...