On Screen
SIMON, JOHN
On Screen FOUR FEATHERS BY JOHN SIMON one of my favorite schoolboy boners runs: "Q.: Who said Kiss me Hardy!'? A.: Laurel." "Kiss me. Hardy!" were, of course, Lord Nelson's dying words to his...
...Our heroes drive about in an overluxuri-ously equipped trailer truck—astronaut surplus stuff—and are pursued by first one, then two supremely sinister vehicles bearing the improbable inscription Camp Willowwood for Boys and Girls, but, by the looks of them, more suited to werewolves and their cubs...
...But much of the film strains our credulity, and the ending invites total disbelief...
...and they run by no visible human agency...
...but this Emma, as played by Glenda Jackson, is a termagant and guttersnipe whom the most sex-starved old seadog would think twice before accosting...
...it also yielded such clinkers as The Bride Wore Black, Mississippi Mermaid and Two English Girls...
...Vilmos Zsigmond's cinematography keeps doing excessively clever and gorgeous things with filters...
...Peter Finch's Nelson is straight man to Miss Jackson's farcical spitfire—a pretty dull performance...
...Unfortunately, the humor gets more and more intermittent toward the end...
...Directed by the British television director, James Cellan Jones, from Rattigan's own screenplay, the movie is so bad as to be occasionally funny, but not nearly often enough...
...Tragicomedy is hard to sustain, and when cuteness has to be resorted to, even harder for the audience to swallow...
...James Caan and Peter Boyle do handsomely by the parts of the more honorable criminals...
...Sally Keller-man and Louise Lasser are nearly as good as their, respectively, hyper-tense and placid molls...
...Here it does acquire a slangy flavor and some fresh twists: Because Camille Bliss, the Machiavellian heroine, is only moderately clever and wears her untrustworthiness practically on her sleeve, her victims have to blind themselves and do most of her dirty work for her...
...even when we do not particularly admire what is included, we marvel at the judiciousness of what is omitted...
...Margaret Leighton does a professional job with the thankless role of Lady Nelson, and Gerry Fisher's color cinematography is competent...
...The basic idea is not without merit: a sexy, irresistible, amoral girl's progress from conquest to conquest...
...On a wall, we perceive Romney's breathtaking portrait with the actress' idealized face painted in...
...Yet the script by W. D. Rich-ter has sequences of controlled insanity (along with periods of slackness) as a pair of amiable crooks chase after some money that should wrongfully belong to them but has been abstracted, even less rightfully, by another bunch of crooks...
...In bygone days, cinematic pseudohistory was always, in the most vulgar sense of the word, a romanticization: In Sir Alexander Korda's That Hamilton Woman (1941), for instance, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh turned Nelson and Lady Hamilton into wonderfully storm-tossed and star-crossed lovers, the glamor of whose relationship more than compensated for the sadness and sordidness of their respective ends...
...Hal Wallis, the American producer of pseudoprestigious trash, ravages British history: Beckel, Anne of the Thousand Days and Mary, Queen of Scots were progressively worse travesties, but The Nelson Affair is downright repugnant...
...The present film is made from an American novel of the same title by one Henry Farrell, and although Truffaut and his coscenarist, Jean-Loup Dabadie, have wrought numerous changes, the triviality remains...
...As Camille...
...The new trend is to make everything seedier and nastier than even history could make it, and earn high marks for realism...
...her rise, despite minor setbacks, from obscurity to the heights of success over the dead or incarcerated bodies of various fall guys and patsies...
...If Slither is straight zaniness...
...These trucks are a triumph of comic evil, with their windows scarcely bigger than slits and well above the reach of someone standing outside...
...It worked twice, in Shoot the Piano Player and Jules and Jim...
...but The Nelson Affair, the movie version of Terence Rattigan's play, A Bequest to the Nation, sorely lacks the presence of Stan and Oliver...
...Fred Myron's score is pretentious...
...It is nice when the suspension of disbelief can be made willingly rather than under duress...
...Nor is this Horatio Nelson—decent, pompous, conventional—more convincing than the matchless hero of quasi-legendary history...
...Their color hovers disturbingly between slime-green and jet-black...
...Yet the film does move along at a splendidly breakneck pace...
...Gary Michael White's script relies rather heavily on the too studiedly offbeat tricki-ness of Pacino (he explains that scarecrows function by making the crows laugh) and on the lumbering lovableness of Hackman, both of whom seem top-heavy with idiosyncrasies...
...The final anticlimax falls a bit flatter than even an anticlimax should, but Laszlo Kovacs' color cinematography is less assertive than usual, and better...
...There are two main problems with the film...
...Their journey east and north, full of tragicomic tribulations, leads them to an unconvincingly sad ending that is, in turn, partially undercut by a feebly comic denouement...
...Andre Dussollier, still a drama student, is perhaps even paler than his part, but color is supplied by Pierre William Glenn's cinematography and Georges Delerue's first satisfying score in years...
...This is the sort of movie where the verisimilitude cannot be scrutinized little enough...
...If one among them finally sees the light—an absurd little romantic rat-catcher played amusingly and touchingly by Charles Denner—he falls, as if by divine providence, off a church tower...
...Yet what finally does in Finch, as well as everyone else, is the dialogue: congealed sauce piquante over a basic witlessness, as if a little rancid seasoning could turn stale mutton into venison...
...And Jones' direction is amateurish, especially in the Trafalgar battle scenes, which were not even shot in a studio tank but, manifestly, on dry land...
...Bernadette Lafont is no longer the juicy young strumpet of Le beau Serge, but she retains a toothsome body and a humorous energy, both of which she brandishes with true flair...
...After that, the merest trifle, like Truffaut's Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me, is a welcome diversion...
...Although it is funny, it is not all that funny, or that original in its gags...
...In a ratty, Dustin Hoffmanish way, Pacino is not unimpressive, either...
...In both cases a formula, a fabrication to suit the presumed temper of the times, takes over, and no effort is made to let the imagination reinvent the truth...
...their fronts are pronouncedly vulpine...
...The implications of Scarecrow get lost in the attitudinizing...
...and though we are meant to sympathize with the young sociologist who falls haplessly in love with Camille, he is too much of a moral and intellectual booby to elicit real sympathy...
...Still, Hackman does a marvel-ously crotchety and stubborn ruffian who gradually thaws out into joky playfulness, and is truly an American Michel Simon here...
...the plotting and dialogue are arch...
...moreover, Zieff is not up to directing a truly funny crowd scene...
...Still, it is a creative obtuseness, endowing people with the courage of their lunatic convictions and enabling them to pursue their crooked aims with a persistence comparable only to the bite of the pit-bull terrier, whose prying loose requires surgical intervention...
...Scarecrow is zany-serious, a lowlife comedy with tragic overtones about two pitiable failures who try to bluster and laugh their way through to an affluence and respectability that will forever elude them...
...The supporting performances are apt, too, for the most part (Penny Allen is the unpleasant exception), and there are a few good scenes, notably a very funny aborted shoplifting episode...
...the real one is a scandal...
...It is almost as if we were living in a Sadian universe, where virtuous Justines are abhorrent to the Creator himself and struck down by lightning bolts, while the evil Juliettes triumph...
...were, of course, Lord Nelson's dying words to his trusty second-in-command...
...That idealized Jackson face is a sacrilege...
...Under Jerry Schatzberg's mannered direction, the implication is always that coarseness and nut-tiness have a special charm, and that proletarians display it with a particularly fetching, bittersweet panache...
...This is one of those absurdist crime films whose archetype is Beat the Devil, in which criminal cunning goes hand in hand with comic criminal obtuseness...
...Even after her fabled beauty had faded and the woman had become coarse, there must have been some remnant of femininity in Lady Hamilton...
...It is an old story, but can always be made new...
...Rattigan's Emma Hamilton, however—a boozing, brawling, slatternly, foul-mouthed fishwife—is not much more believable than the radiant creature of high romance...
...and the whole thing strikes me as Harper's Zteaar-Rabelaisian...
...With them, it could have been deliberately parodic instead of unintentionally ludicrous...
...It is sad that Truffaut should be so enamored of rubbishy novels (showing that, for all his intelligence, he rather lacks taste) as to base film after film upon them...
...for all that, I wish its villains were not so murderously efficacious in the beginning and such utter bunglers thereafter...
...Because Al Pacino, ex-merchant seaman tramping toward Detroit and the illegitimate child he left there, amuses him, Hackman takes him on as a partner...
...Among the supporting intriguers, Allen Garfield and Richard B. Shull are suitably outrageous, and the scene of the Polish-American War Veterans' dance rises almost to the heights of social satire...
...Close to this is Slither, the movie debut of the TV director Howard Zieff...
...Gene Hack-man is a hobo just out of jail with an idee fixe about a car wash business he will buy himself in Pittsburgh...
Vol. 56 • May 1973 • No. 10
