Taste and Tastelessness

...Compare, for instance, the way nature looks in this film and in Women in Love...

...Michael York is a supremely monotonous actor and has, moreover, the head of a blond rat...

...The main reason, I suppose, is that Virgin is a novella of some hundred pages...

...But the film exudes atmosphere without, somehow, acting smug about it...

...But now she is Yvette, and, once again, all is well...

...but it is not so long as to oblige him to cut ruthlessly and disfiguringly, nor so short as to force him into wholesale inventions and additions...

...in several others currently playing, it is laid on thick and takes a terrible beating...

...Something for Everyone, described in the program as a "contemporary fairytale" (I don't know about the contemporary), is a thoroughly unsavory film...

...The great lacuna of the film— aside from Maurice Denham, who, able actor though he is, makes the Rector too rigidly pressed and dried between the pages of a hymnal—is Franco Nero's Gypsy...

...Fawcett, not yet married pending her divorce, but living together and ostracized...

...His sex with the young son (Anthony Corlan, a sullen, dimension-less performer), is also lovingly dwelt on: whereas heterosexual sex is always shown as hasty, sordid hugger-mugger...

...In the film, she actually leaves for London with the pair (Major Eastwood and Mrs...

...the jolie laide, at a slight turn of the face, became irreproachably lovely...

...Beneath the muted, velvety surface, there was incandescence...

...she is descended, she says, from Attila the Hun and is the widow of a scion of Barbarossa —or, as Miss Lansbury pronounces it, "Barbarosa," further decreasing an already minuscule credibility...

...Though many of her actions are performed in a dreamy slow motion, something bristles behind the bars of her gaze and her voice, something spoiling to dart out of its cage...

...But he has good legs which, in their minilederhosen, the camera keeps lovingly hugging...

...In the film, the Major's repressed stirrings toward Yvette register more strongly than the Gypsy's undivided desire...

...Lawrence in one place speaks of the girl's "young, clear, baffled" eyes, and that is what Miss Shimkus epitomizes: a baffled clarity...

...What Hugh Wheeler, a flabby and floundering Broadway playwright, has scripted here, is a broadened version of Teorema and Boom, a sexually polymorphous fantasy with a little black humorlessness thrown in...

...But I think that the lion share of our indignation should be directed at a society that through obsolete laws begets needless concealment and falsifying strategies...

...The Virgin and the Gypsy (Lawrence's spelling, gipsy, is not preserved) concerns two young sisters who return to their father's gloomy rectory after school days in France (Lausanne, in the story...

...yet desire, the Gypsy's absurd but absolutely natural craving for Yvette, and the salutary response it kindles, are the subject of the story...

...As for Yvette's departure with her new friends, it is both more contemporary (a dubious motivation) and more cinematic (a justifiable motivation) than Lawrence's minor-key ending...

...Though the Gypsy half of the title is a failure, the Virgin is a success...

...The novel on which it is based, Harry Kressing's The Cook, is said to be something rather better and quite different...

...Plater and Miles treat this closing scene wistfully rather than triumphantly...

...He then conveniently kills off in an "accident" all three Pleschkes, seduces the Countess, and is about to become master of the castle, only to be blackmailed by the odious and obese nymphet into marrying her instead...

...Things went no better for her in her first fully American movie, Tlie Lost Man, Robert Alan Aurthur's dreary updating of Odd Man Out...

...That leaves the girl juvenile, who turns out to be the chief villain of the film...

...The scene in which he defies his captors (to whom our hero has betrayed him— we are to believe that no one before had penetrated into the butler's room), notably a Nazi-witchhunt-ing Mayor presented as a figure of vulgar fun, very clearly stresses his filial love, dignity and courage...

...Though held back, sex is alive in this film...

...in the book, she stays on, having just a slight chance of full self-realization...

...Joanna Shimkus is one of the most captivating actresses of the international screen, a member of an all too select group including her fellow bilingual Canadian, Genevieve Bujold, Lisa Gastoni and Jacqueline Bisset (both shamefully denied the chances they deserve), Vanessa Redgrave and Jane Fonda, Susannah York and Julie Christie (when the spirit happens to move them), and probably one or two others who do not occur to me at the moment...

...Here, with Bob Huke's much more controlled color photography, the landscape looks sheerly English: the sunlight seems spread about thinly and frangibly, an infinitely precious commodity...

...and, under a bright young director, she was undeniably acting...

...And how beautifully Miles has recreated the look and feel of both the exteriors and interiors of the place and time (the '20s), avoiding the flashiness from which Ken Russell's Women in Love is never quite free...

...Nero fiddles while Mark burns...

...True, there is an overtly homosexual part of the plot, which, for the first time in a major-studio release, shows male homosexuals kissing, however stagjly and awkwardly...

...Uncle Fred, whom Norman Bird keeps an almost invisible speck...

...Next, in Enrico's fine little film, Zita, her centripetal intensity hovering between childishness and womanhood, Miss Shimkus gave a definitive portrait of a girl's coming of age...

...In retaliation, anything that the so-called normal world considers healthy and decent —and some of it, so help us, is healthy and decent—is systematically trodden underheel...

...Miss Lansbury looks like an aging female impersonator gone sloppy, who allows himself to be photographed in costume but without a wig—a bisected androgyne, woman below, man on top...

...the bustily brooding gypsy wife of Imogen Hassell...

...In any case, this film version written by Alan Plater, a Yorkshire playwright (the novella takes place in a vague North Country setting), and directed by 29-year-old Christopher Miles (his first feature film) emerges as a minor but lively pleasure...

...the gamine could turn inside out, like a glove, into a jemme fatale...

...Her entire performance is a quiet fulmination...

...T > he plot tells of a penniless but richly calculating young German immoralist (Michael York) who lands a menial job at the impoverished Countess' fabulous castle by way of a little murder, works his way up the servants' ladder through every kind of intrigue, including sleeping with the Countess' young son, and arranges for the wealthy Pleschkes to make the castle solvent by getting their daughter, whom he also beds, to marry the aforementioned son and lover...

...Sometimes it is as if she were fashioned entirely of the finest suede, with only the eyes made of moire silk...

...and the flowers have that doomed look of precociously gifted people who will die young...

...I am not sure that heterosexuals will be all that happy with the spate of overtly homosexual films that will gush forth once inversion becomes legal, but at least the films will be more honest, will probably not idealize Nazis, and will not depict women as horrors—if they bother to depict them at all...

...though she behaves like a snobbish cow, we are supposed to see in her a high-strung thoroughbred...

...The filmmakers rightly chose to shoot the picture in "Lawrence country" instead of farther north, for the descriptions in the tale are pure Derbyshire...

...God only knows where the notion that Miss Lansbury has class originated...

...True, the local rich boy who is Yvette's swain is made a bit unduly bumpkinish, and...

...But her daughter, the alleged ingenue of the film, is played by an actress called Heidelinde Weis, who is boring as a performer, unattractive as a woman, apparently at least as old as her mother (40 if she is a day), and even more profoundly dishonest and corrupt...

...There is an aura of impermanence here and of exultation in summer while it lasts, very much as in the still more Nordic films of Bergman and the Scandinavians...

...The movie is not only slapped together ineptly, not only pretentious, unfunny and obvious, it is also a prime example of disguised homosexuality at its distorting worst...

...She is, in fact, common, and her mugging, rattling-off of lines, and camping around merely make her into that most degraded thing an outre actress can decline into: a fag hag...

...the mood is not one of easy victory but of guarded hope...

...the greens seem to have been obliged to fight brown and grey to arrive at their greenness...

...But it is not only sexual values that are prestidigitated with...

...Angela Lansbury plays a German countess...

...And when he says something about none of these good burghers being worthy enough to have cleaned his father's boots, the scene is written, directed and acted so as to make us accept this as the truth...

...T ypical of these is Something for Everyone, the film-direc-lorial debut of Hal Prince, the Broadway producer-director...

...Her acting was not yet much, but by the time she appeared in Robert Enrico's Les Aventuriers (released here by Universal in mangled form as The Last Adventure), she was reborn...

...I submit that the entire film exemplifies a kind of vengeance on the heterosexual world by a mentality resenting its real or alleged compulsion to dissemble and hide its predilections...

...perhaps her vestigial lower-middle-class English accent passes for that in our informed show-biz circles...

...There followed Ho.', a potboiler I have not seen, with Bel-mondo...

...And Christopher Miles is to be complimented for the most intelligent use of nudity in recent films: it is sparse and artfully scattered through the picture, tasteful and also genuinely erotic...

...There the colors are exaggerated to the point where England seems to be Italy if not Brazil, and you wonder why a trip to Switzerland should have had such an effect on the principals: the Matterhorn, after all that green and gold and pink, looks rather sober and puritanical...

...Nero may be the reason for spelling the word with a "y"—so gypped do we feel by his nonperformance...

...Opposed to the Orensteins are the parvenu Pleschkes, supposed to embody all that is loathsomely nouveau riche and coarse: and worst among them, naturally, is Frau Pleschke, portrayed as a prototypical pushy, long-cigaret-holdered vulgarian...

...As played by Jane Carr (who was acceptable in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) and directed by Prince, she is an unmitigatedly repugnant weirdo, a sort of overweight child bride of Dracula...

...Women, on the other hand, is a novel of well over 500...

...then Joseph Losey's Boom, where the actress was badly photographed and directed, and emerged insignificant and whiny...

...We are told that the butler himself was only old enough to be in the Hitlerjugend, though he looks to be about the age Goeb-bels would be now...

...Typically, though this Countess von Orenstein spouts the most arrogant drivel, we are to take it as Wildean wit...

...The novella may be just about the only form of fiction that readily lends itself to cinematic adaptation: It is long enough to offer the filmmaker a sufficiency of material to use, expand, or drop...

...Unlike the Major, this Gypsy suggests nothing with his empty blue-eyed stare...

...Her French was greatly improved...

...Take, first of all, the women...

...a hairdo was found to give her face the needed softness—there is that large bony nose, which Miss Shimkus stands by as courageously as by her unprepossessing Lithuanian last name...

...The film spells things out more than the story, adds illustrative incidents or details that are a trifle obvious, but does not, on the whole, take liberties of a distracting nature...

...Superior, too, in this film are the minor characters: the dread matriarch, Mater, chillingly disembodied by Fay Compton...

...Nothing is made in the film of her Jew-ishness, but Honor Blackman's Mrs...

...Aunt Cissy, played with self-pity always abutting on hatefulness by Kay Walsh...

...Even such an added episode as Uncle Fred's risque contribution to the Church Benefit is handled tactfully enough and remains in character...

...A fashion model, Joanna Shimkus left Canada for Paris on a brief modeling assignment, and landed a part in Paris vu par . . . —the Godard episode, in which she sported a delightful little English accent in her French, a youthfully impudent face fluctuating between blase sulkiness and bursts of naive enthusiasm, and a perfect figure: girlish where girl-ishncss is best, womanly where womanliness is better...

...Particularly fine is the Eastwood-Fawcett couple: devoted, genial yet vaguely corroded by their ostracism...

...What is objectionable is the covert slanting of the film toward making heterosexual relations unappetizing, and toward turning moral values upside down...

...the atmosphere at the rectory seems a shade more unrelievedly dank than in the book—perhaps because Maurice Denham lacks the handsomeness and boyishness Lawrence accords the Rector...

...Lucille is gradually submerged in the lifedenying puritanism of the rectory, while Yvette, partly through her own healthiness, partly through a fleeting involvement with a gypsy, and partly through her friendship with a more enlightened couple who spend a holiday in the neighborhood, manages to emancipate herself...

...In a typical death-wish fantasy, the only character in the film permitted to have solid moral values is a saturnine old butler whose room is plastered with photographs of his late father, an SS colonel, of whom he speaks with admiration and adoration...

...Fawcett perfectly personifies a certain Semitic intensity and slightly overrouged vitality...

...That is not objectionable...

...And Mark Burns capably conveys a solidity that stops short of stolidity, a calmness not without heat below...