On Screen

...tinge of mockery in his voice I wish I could explain it better, but what it comes down to surely is something few actors can communicate inspiration from above and intelligence from within For Scott's performance alone The Hospital demands to be seen Otto Premmger's Such Good Friends, based on Lois Gould's semiautobiographical novel (which I haven't read), is a movie that succeeds in being both brash and slick in such a way as to allow these potentially interesting vices to cancel each other out Pushed a bit farther into brashness, it might have become genuinely chilling, with a shinier slickness, it might have been at least superficially funny As it stands it has one good scene m it, that is all Julie Messmger is a young woman whose husband, Richard, is hospitalized for the routine removal of a mole, through a senes of epic blunders, he goes from not so bad to worst He is the art director of a big magazine and a minor writer, as his wife, the insecure, masochistic Julie is drawn into the semisocial, quasi-mtellectual whirl of New York's marginal literati and lesser artists, where she is ill at ease Searching for her husband's medical insurance, she stumbles on his little black book, which records impressive sexual bouts with all their female friends and acquaintances While her husband is in a constant coma, Julie proceeds to have her revenge through dalliances with their male friends Richard dies and Julie is (rather unconvincmgly) liberated As a predatory pack of friends and relatives jabber away in her apartment about what she should do now, she takes her two children and goes off into Central Park with them he plot is, in full, every bit as unrewarding as this brief summary Its two mam themes—the criminal bungling by supposedly expert modern medicine, and the repressed heroine's retaliatory and emancipatory adulteries—have nothing to do with each other, certainly Elaine May, who pseudonymously wrote the screenplay, fails to make them mesh No less disheartening is the general superficiality of it all, thus the brief scenes of early maternal domination or desperate lesbian dabbling are both too skimpy and too cliched to explain anything, and the vignettes with calculating relatives and treacherous friends are both too obviously conceived and too ponderously executed There are three scenes in which Premmger's vulgarity equals that of Ken Russell at his worst and that is no mean achievement One shows us the agma and flabby Burgess Meredith as Julie imagines him, dancing in the nude Another has Ken Howard, as her husband's best friend, puffing and churning away on top of Julie in a temporary access of impotence (impotence, if 1 may wax paradoxical, seems to be in these days) The third has Julie performing fellatio on her fat and effete family doctor, James Coco, while he is kept on the phone by an irksome female patient The first part of this jape has Coco trying to remove his girdle without letting Julie notice it, the second consists of incongruities and double entendres between what is happening verbally above and hngually below The third part is worse yet Preminger eliminated a shot of Julie getting up suddenly and colliding with Coco, but kept in his line "Did I hit you on the nose7" and that now takes on truly nauseating implications Even when the film is not scraping bottom, it does not soar more than a few inches above it Dyan Cannon, as Julie, exudes a stupidity that strikes me uncomfortably as the actress' own contribution to the part, her one true talent is for bitchmess, a rather lowly gift The rest of the cast have almost nothing to do, although that still proves too much for Jennifer O'Neill, whose lack of talent is stupendous Most interesting is Nina Foch, as Julie's coldly distant mother, Miss Foch, who somehow never made it big as a leading actress, may yet do very well in character parts Beyond that, there is that one good scene at lunch in the hospital cafeteria where the idiotic pseudowisdom of the specialists is funnily, frightemngly and, above all, convincingly lampooned The scene points an accusing finger both at medicine and, alas, at the rest of the film Diamonds Ate Foiever is autumnal, mature James Bond Our hero is now less often in and out of bed, his life is sometimes saved by mere chance, and he shows signs of middle-age spread There is even a scene where two sexy female athletes, Thumper and Bambi, thump hell out of him until he manages to bamboozle them, and there is greater emphasis on humor than ever before And Charles Gray is a villain worthy of so suave a hero as James Bond...

...On Screen VULGARITY WITH A VENGEANCE BY JOHN SIMON M—_ Just as l am ready to bet my bottom dollar that Ken Russell could not make a film worth a farthing, along comes The Boy Friend to prove me wrong True, with this film Russell deliberately undertook to confute those ot us who claimed that he was incapable of turning out anything wholesome, and though he wms more or less, we do not entirely lose Coming after monstrosities hke The Music Lovers and The Devils, this movie version of Sandy Wilson's amiable httle musical may seem tame stuff indeed, but looked at from the direction of the stage original?a winsome, harmless, affectionate spoof of the '30s—Russell's film reveals a rather more disquieting aspect I would not go along with the local wag who dubbed it the first horror musical, but I cannot deny that the surface erupts into npples attesting to a maelstrom beneath Unfortunately, James Aubrey, the head of MGM, saw fit to excise some 15-32 minutes of the movie (the figure has been variously reported), and Russell was said to be on the point of challenging Aubrey to a duel unto the death That this never took place is regrettable, for, whatever the outcome, the movies would have become a better place to live in As things stand, I don't know whether Aubrey cut the film for greater brevity or greater purity Nor, given London's lagging behind Hollywood when it comes to feminme pulchritude, can I be quite sure whether the prevailing untoothsomeness of the girls m the film was perversely deliberate But bits of Russelhan kinki-ness are recognizable even m this anodyne film Thus in the midst of demurely covered-up dancing girls there suddenly bobs into sight Barbara Windsor, a grotesque dumpling whose hypertrophic breasts, under a mere wisp of gauze, Jiggle away like melting cathedral bells trying to ring out a fire alarm Or, in one of several Busby Berkeleyish production numbers, the camera tracks under an endless bridge of thighs, gliding circularly from crotch to overarching crotch Again, when one of the girls is skipping rope in a stage routine, the rope, manipulated by other girls, is repeatedly tautened and pulled up as if to slice the girl in half, with suggestions of some strange new perversion we might call bisectuahty And when a bunch of showgirls discover that a famed Hollywood director has come to see their failing production of The Boy Friend (the musical within the frame story, invented by Russell) in a rickety, gaping, provincial music hall, they proceed to turn the stage into a perpendicular castmg couch for him, some of them even dancing their way mto his proscenium box Still, there is some justification for parts of this It would have been virtually impossible to translate The Boy Friend into film literally and faithfully The Wilson stage piece is so slight and intimate as to work only on a stage, and a small one in a cozy theater, at that Once you introduce color and widescreen photography and the camera's insatiable, nearly uncontrolled hunger for devouring more people and things and space, some kind of adaptation becomes mandatory Russell, as his own scenarist, has taken what was a gentle send-up of old musicals and added a not so gentle persiflage of theater, movies, movie musicals, and showbiz in general Various kinds of satire jostle one another There is the typical backstage infighting, and the notorious movie-musical gimmick of the timid assistant stage manager having to go on for the ailing star to save the show, there is the theatrical cliche of the despotic producer-director bullying everyone m sight, and the movie-musical cliche of a small stage expanding, for a superproduction number, into a vast sound stage where the choreography is afflicted with instant elephantiasis So Russell's film swells into an anthology of showbiz absurdities, a compendium of stereotypes impudently exaggerated to the point where we are forced both to laugh and squirm at the imbecility of our favorite entertainments Russell can put a cliche to inventively new uses Thus the pit orchestra in this large but almost deserted music hall consists of three jaded players, enabling Russell and his composer, Peter Maxwell Davies, to underorchestrate the already sparsely scored Wilson tunes and give them a sound of even tinnier exiguity Later, when the theatrical manager wants to impress the great DeThnll, the slumming Hollywood director, he sends out for orchestral reinforcements All that can be obtained is a trio of buskers, musical beggars who butcher the hit tunes in the street outside the theater Pressed into pit service, they perform equally erratically, permitting Davies to spice up the caressing melodies with some racy dissonance, a musical fretwork of wrong-note frissons All this, of course, makes hash of the endearing little stage musical?immerses it in a world of bickerings and bitchinesses, fantasies and phantasmagoria m which the original very nearly drowns But some of its tunefulness proves indestructible, and for almost every incurred loss there is a bit of mcremental invention As usual with Russell, this invention is pushed all the way to remote archness There is, for instance, a number where the girls, dressed m national costumes, disingenuously commiserate with the heroine The girl who smgs, "What a shame your fellow turned out to be a rotter and a cad," wears a Dutch costume and a windmill for headgear—an audiovisual pun on rotter and Rotterdam Still, I repeat, Russell does convey m the film a vision of film and theater as a curious symbiosis of innocence and vice He gets able assistance from various quarters, most notably from Twiggy, the fashion model turned actress This transition has seldom been successful, for every one Lauren Bacall who bridges the gap, hosts of others vanish into it after the first failed leap Some, to be sure, drag on from performance to drearier performance (like Lauren Hutton or Jennifer O'Neill) but more of them (like Jean Shnmpton, Twiggy's chief fashion rival) immediately freeze into miniature Mount Rushmores But Twiggy, I predict, will last She already can dance and smg tolerably, and she acts with a charming diffidence belied by a natural grace She has a quality of wide-eyed wonder, of innate modesty, and as Russell photographs her, her eyes almost bleed out of the image Twiggy is one of your authentic babes m the woods, and, these days, the woods are anything but full of them She wanders through the thickets of the film like someone who cannot see the genuine paltriness from the imagined enchantment, cannot see the stunted trees from the fairy-tale forest, and her innocence is catching The film also has the excellent services of Tony Walton as set designer, David Watkm as cinematog-rapher, and the aforementioned Davies as resident musician, even Mrs Russell's tawdry costumes fit the bill, perhaps fortuitously but nicely enough The acting is generally competent, with Max Adrian's and Vladek Sheybal's overblown caricatures handily absorbed by the outlandishness of the context The one senous flaw is Christopher Gable, the ex-ballet dancer and favored member of Russell's repertory company, m the male lead Gable is all right for character parts, but cast as a goigeous dreamboat he founders immediately Tl B Wy a strange duplication not infrequent m movie annals, we suddenly have two films making cruel fun of hospitals American hospitals doubtless deserve every well-aimed kick they get, but both The Hospital and Such Good Friends weaken their cases either through ridiculous exaggeration or by dilution in sensationalism and irrelevancies It may be that neither film's principal concern is the expose and ridicule of our hospitals, yet considering how tawdry and spurious the other concerns are, I am left lamenting two missed opportunities The Hospital was written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Arthur Hiller, the team that gave us The Americanization of Emily, a hambanded satire of war heroes Here we have a middle-aged chief of the medical staff of a big New York hospital, Dr Bock, who finds his sexual potency gone, his marriage a failure, his son a dreary hippie and New Leftist phrasemonger whom he had to toss out on his ear, and his hospital a disaster area in which every kind of social, political and medical chaos is rampaging The most immediate calamity is a series of violent deaths befalling young doctors, interns and nurses The deaths do not arise credibly from some sort of basic disorder satirically magnified, but, in Chayefsky's lurid plotting, stem from a homicidal madman on the loose—a madman, by the way, displaying skills far beyond those of the average maniac in fact or fiction Concurrently, the hospital staff is allowed to sink to the level of characters in absurdist comedy, out of keeping with the senous muckraking intentions the author seems to harbor I shall not even try to trace the convolutions of the plot Suffice it to say that Dr Bock, on the verge of suicide, is drawn back to life by the charms of a young braless hippie who has a thing for men in their 50s, and whom the doctor, after delivering an impassioned tirade in defense of impotence, throws to the floor and has sex with three times in a row Swinger though she is, she nevertheless falls deeply in love with him and starts luring him to New Mexico to minister to her needs as well as those of the Hope-eye Indians as Diana Rigg pronounces it But when wildly irrational extremist groups cause the resignation of the hospital's administrative director, Bock allows his sense of responsibility to prevail over the ioys of rediscovered potency and he stays on at the hospital It is all utter hokum, especially that hippie from Boston played without a shred of credibility or aptitude by Miss Rigg Pretentious and preposterous as the part is in the writing, she manages to make it even more ludicrous in the acting She is, moreover, far too British, old, and smug for the role, and would seem much more competent to freeze vital fluids than to release them Aside from some funny but crude gags and a number of good New York character actors contributing nice bits, the one thing that makes the film truly interesting is George C Scott as the Doctor Scott is somewhat of a mystery to me He acts too "big" for the screen, with effects generally more suited to the stage, yet he manages to be effective and delightful on screen in a way that other "big" stage actors?say, James Earl Jones—are not The reason may be a saving ironic flavor to his comedy, and the maniacally but quietly sustained demonism of his dramatics When serious, Scott is a driven being, something from the outside takes possession of him When outrageously farcical, as here, Scott gives his performance an ironic edge with a conspiratorial sardonic glitter in the eye and the bares...