On Screen

...On Screen BUNDLES FROM BRITAIN BY JOHN SIMON Sundav, Bloody Sunday has all the surface glitter a film or a candy wrappmg could amass The plot itself seems dazzlingly new a young career woman has an affair with a very young sculptor who is also having an affair with a middle-aged Jewish doctor It is all very sophisticated Alex Greville is an upper-class divorcee working in executive placement, and leads a moderately swinging hie among Leftist-liberal friends while keeping a superiorly sloppy house for herself Dr Daniel Hirsh is a respectable general practitioner from a wealthy Orthodox family who lives neatly, graciously, and with warm appreciation of the arts As for Bob Elkm, he is upward-mobile, which describes his sculpture almost as well as his psychosocial status, and swings merrily both ways, with latchkeys to both Alex's and Daniel's fiats So, you see, it is really a tnsexual triangle one heterosexual, one homosexual, one bisexual—something for every taste and every type of self-identification And whomever you identify yourself with, you can feel smugly superior to your compeers and kinfolk Daniel is so ahead of his business-and-synagogue-ori-ented family, Alex is so emancipated from her parents' civil-service background, and Bob, though lower-class, has soared so high above his origins on the wings of his pop art (Or op, or slop, or whatever art it is) And everyone is aware of everything Alex is jealous of Daniel but also respectful of him—tor they both frequent that family of jolly radicals where the small children smoke pot and follow their elders' love affairs, Daniel, for his part, is downright concerned with how Bob may be treating her Alex's parents are on excellent terms with her ex-husband, and Daniel and Alex even share the same telephone answering service, as they discover to their amusement In other words, this is updated Noel Coward or, better yet, Freddie Lonsdale, with lots of good furniture, the biggest and most sumptuous bar mitzvah celebration this side of the Queen's Ball, good-looking cars and children, and sorrows, in the mam, gallantly stifled There are bad moments—like the divorcee's concluding that theie are times when nothing is better than something, or the doctor's learning that his lovei will not accompany him on an Italian vacation But it all has a way ot being absorbed by those multiple layers of civilized amorality, and the bittersweet final encounter between Alex and Daniel, both abandoned by Bob, has such genteel, fastidious solicitude about it as to make upper-middle-class melancholy look like a positive badge of merit Surely, you say, there must be more A bisexual involved with a socially, culturally and perhaps intellectually superior man and woman, manipulating them both though also having some genuine feeling tor them —this must make for a searching character study Not in a film by John Schlesmger, with a script by Penelope Gilliatt, it doesn't The young man is the least examined figure of the three, a mere type, used as a counter to elicit reactions from the others As he is presented by the filmmakers, and nonacted by Murray Head, nothing inside him is revealed, not even what his lovers could see in him, except perhaps youth, cockiness, and nostalgie de la bone But, then, maybe the feelings of Alex and Daniel are thoroughly scrutinized7 No Incidents are there—Daniel being embarrassed by the inopportune reappearance of one of his former pickups, Alex allowing herself to be swept into a one-night stand with one of her unhappy, aging, suddenly jobless executive clients Yet I never truly had a sense of what Alex wants from life, or of how Daniel got to be what he is Or why I should care about either of them What Schlesmger and Miss Gilliatt are very good at is conveying the outer shapes ot existences, the little rugosities and sheknesses ot the con-lours The dialogue is crisp enough, and the images even ensper in the color cinematography of Billy Williams, who does better, because less flashily, here than in Women in Love Nevertheless, gimmicks are everywhere 1 don't believe that on a gloomy night dnve through the center of London Daniel would encounter a swarm ot roller skaters racing down Piccadilly, that innocent kids would be regaled by the sight of young hoodlums vandalizing parked cars, that a doctor would be so humihat-ingly disbelieved by a clerk in an all-night drugstore While such miseries do occur in life, in this film they take on a peculiarly smart-aleck, contrived air—perhaps because the whole movie seems to rely on consist ot such footling clevernesses There are awkwardnesses, too, like a flashback to Alex's childhood that lemains totally unmtegrated and unhelpful or a final soliloquy ot Daniel's that is stilted in its ef-forts to avoid grandiloquence Or the device of superimposing the days ot the week on the image with which each new day begins—it looks poi-tentous but adds nothing In fact, the Tuesdays are just as bloody as the Sundays, if the point is the very uni-foimity and barrenness of all the days, that does not come across very conipellingly either Actually, these lives are rather too glamorous to justify any great sympathy from the viewer But the acting, except from Mi Head, is so good as to jerk unearned sympathy I am always overjoyed to see that wonderfully solid, no-nonsense actor, Peter Finch, who imbues whatever he does with exquisite tact and grace And, in smaller roles, I greatly admired Tony Button and Peggy Ashcrott among many fine others Glenda Jackson is a powerful actress, but everything about her, including her walk, is just a little too ugly for my taste And is it in her contract that every film she appears in must also feature that wretched, scrawny bosom of hers7 At least Schlesmger gives it mercifully short shrift The director, I repeat, is a dextrous, facile proto-artist I suspect that it is from Elio Petri that he has learned how to make the furnishings ot a place literally act, and it is surely trom TrufFaut's Stolen Knses with its pneumatique cables that the idea of giving the telephone wires a juicy cameo role was derived Allow me to describe one typical Schlesmger shot Bob is seen adjusting a wall clock, he is framed by the top fifth ot the wide-screen image, the lower four fifths blotted out by what tmns out to be the back ot a large armchair Presently the chair swings around, and we see Alex's head in it in large closeup, with Bob hovering up there in the background Later, the chair swings back again It is a sequence during which Alex voices her de profundis but we are much more aware of the camera setup and directorial tnckiness than of what is said or felt Still, let us not minimize the film's ingenuity, especially in such scenes as the death of the dog Only let us not confuse cleverness with depth A MUCH MORE humane and moving film is the unfortunately renamed Long Ago, Toinoitow?though the British title, The Raging Moon, is scarcely better Bryan Forbes, both as scenarist and director, has an extremely erratic record, but this film, based on a novel by Peter Marshall, shows him at his not inconsiderable best in each capacity The story sounds unpromising on paper An arrogant young lower-class soccer player loses the use of his legs Rather than return to his already cheerless home, he goes to a church-run institution for paraplegics Here he is a misfit first because of his bitterness and hate, later, when he falls happily in love with another inmate, a 30-ish upper-middle-class gill, it is their love that clashes with the narrow regulations and pretistic minds that govern the institution If I summarized more ot the plot, you'd suspect a Love Stoiy on wheels, and vou'd be dead wrong Yes, the film verges on sentimentality, yet its glory is never to lapse into it Its pathos is mitigated at one end by a hard sense ot practical reality, at the other, by a sane sense of humor Although this humor occasionally gets a little heavyhanded, the sentiment never goes sloppy Indeed, some passages in the film are as quietly humane, enhghtenedly observant, and dignifiedly, genuinely, punfyingly sad as any I have seen on film Even the occasional cliches are handled with a certain wryness that revivifies their familiarity But the people, even in tiny parts, are people, the dialogue is the speech of men and women, and the story has a clear-eyed intensity that earns every feeling it elicits One of the stiengths of the film is Forbes' remarkable sense of rhythm The length of each scene strikes me as absolutely right, its pacing not only true to itself, but finely contrasting with that ot the previous or succeeding scene, and always beautifully dovetailing into what follows The transitions are particularly harmonious, like carpentry that fits so pei-tectly with joints and dowels as not to require a single nail No less praiseworthy is Tony Inn's cinematography, mostly pale colors, like washes of thin green, lavender, gray, brown It is almost always winter 01 near-winter yet the outdoors occasionally take on a richness of russets, a burnished fulfillment An idyllic trip to the wintry seaside is mostly sobering grays and browns, yet the heroine's coat and the lovers' happiness burn with scarlet delight Forbes has as good an ear as an eye The sound effects of the film are marvelous, like the heartbreaking clatter of a Ping-Pong ball that hops away beyond the reach of a paraplegic But the visual details are nothing short of thrilling whether the way two figures are reflected, with significant shifts, m the unequal panels ot a three-way mirror, or the little lurches ot wheelchairs crossing an impudent ridge m a terrace floor In the leads, Malcolm McDowell and Nanette Newman are unimprovable upon, and the supporting cast is first-late, with especially incisive performances by Barry Jackson, Geof-liey Whitehead, Margery Mason and Michael Lees...