Playing Up, Down and Side by Side

...The locales around Boston are well chosen: They have flavor but are not self-consciously atmospheric...

...At best, he is pitiful...

...He has had his hard times: Every bone in his hand was once broken by some vengeful associates in crime, and he has served time before...

...He drunkenly drives it into a wall again and again while singing the army songs of World War I, in which he distinguished himself, and which marks the beginning of the end for the old, aristocratic England...

...Almost equally good is Robert Shaw's Leadbetter: slightly ambitious, ever so faintly calculating, and a bit of a bully, but with a cockiness that does not exclude human warmth and a rather touching fran-gibility...

...Or the criminal may be shown as intensely human (ourselves but for the grace of God), good, chivalrous, responsible underneath his unfortunate deviation into crime...

...The mere interruption of an upper-class conversation by workers banging away outside the windows is stretched and underlined to a degree of portentous-ness the incident cannot be expected to bear...

...After all, man cannot live by trucking alone...

...In Shaft in Africa (written and directed by whites), the blacks are braver, finer, more civilized and more beautiful than the whites, most of whom are fools, sickies or swine...

...Lady Franklin is going to marry Captain Cantrip, an unscrupulous but socially acceptable opportunist...

...Shaft, the black private eye, makes mincemeat of the white villains, except when they are attractive women?in which case he beds them and lets some evil white make mincemeat of them...

...It latches on to footling irritations instead, and feverishly attempts to inflate and aggrandize them...

...It would have been possible perhaps simply to establish this class hatred and allow things to work themselves out...

...Victor J. Kempner always struck me as a drab color cinematographer, and here his limitations become a virtue...

...The various criminal lifestyles are deftly sketched in...

...During the early scenes, when the Lady is being driven about suburban and rural sections of England, no opportunity is missed to surround the Rolls-That stately English home on wheels-with images of abject poverty: peasants and workers moiling slavishly, or milling about in front of dilapidated hovels, or gazing at the Lady's progress with hollow stares...

...In a frenzy, Leadbetter beats up his successful rival, then proceeds to wreck the Rolls in a symbolic massacre...

...This misunderstanding grows until Leadbetter is rejected in an acutely painful scene...

...Marc Wilkinson's score itself, good as it initially is, succumbs to this inflationary mania...

...She is at odds with her world, especially with her egotistical widowed mother, and takes some comfort in the sturdy simplicity of the hired driver...

...Guy Hamilton's Bond film is the better of the two, but it lacks such historic insights as when Shaft tells a French police inspector: "Listen, you motherfucker, my people were building churches when yours were still living in caves...

...The grand master of this humane criminality was and is Jean Gabin-no supercrook, only an ordinary, passionate, suffering human being...

...Why then is all this merely not boring instead of gripping...

...But Mitchum is a little too ordinary, soft-pedaled and victimized to compel identification with him...

...Or the fellow may be a creepily spell-binding psychotic (in the Richard Widmark-George Macready-RobertHossein tradition) whose vicious doings we watch as the Hellenes watched their tragic heroes, for perhaps only in this kind of supreme, mad evil can pure individuality still assert itself today?hence the spell cast by a Charles Manson...

...Yet the reason that The Hireling isn't better than it is, or even as good as the foregoing paragraphs imply, is that the nature of class hatred is only hinted at and not profoundly explored...

...Beginning with a cow-eyed, quasi-inert anxiety prone to instant relapse, she reactivates Helen by fine, tremulous degrees, first into humanity, then into womanliness, thence into giddy flir-tatiousness and, finally, upper-class, commanding toughness...

...The reason is the twofold undercutting of Eddie: First, the plot is allowed to stray too far from him, so that for long stretches we are more involved with a cool, swinging stolen-gun-seller (juicily underplayed by Steven Keats), or with the mechanics of bank robbery as performed by Scalise's gang, in which, again, Eddie is not directly involved...

...The chap may be a dazzling master criminal whose intellect fascinates us while we are also eager to learn what minor oversight, trick of chance, or unexpected bit of humanity will bring low that computerized mind...

...In the latest James Bond film, Live and Let Die, all the villains are black and 007 makes mincemeat of them, except when they are to be bedded down first-Tn which case some evil black makes mincemeat of them...

...And police tactics are revealed in all their plodding shabbiness and fallibility...

...Most effective is the film's very beginning, with the recently widowed, guilt-ridden Helen Franklin being released from a genteel sanatorium after a nervous collapse...

...Eddie Coyle (Robert Mitchum) is a smalltime crook who cannot afford the two years of prison he faces for transporting stolen whisky in his truck because his wife and children would have to go on welfare...

...Like Joseph Losey's unfortunate The Go-Between, it is based on a novel by L. P. Hartley, and likewise exudes a subdued but rancorous class hatred that, in one way or another, infests every scene...

...The screenplay by Wolf Manko-witz probably oversimplifies and exacerbates Hartley's tortured indirections: Though I do not know this particular novel, I know Mankowitz all too well...

...There are three ways of making a gangster or hoodlum interesting...

...Fine cameo performances are delivered also by Elizabeth Sellars, as Helen's mother, whose chill envy of her daughter's youth masquerades as carping maternal concern, and Peter Egan, who makes the feckless Cantrip indomitable by that spineless, impudently graceful insinuation that somehow infiltrates stones...

...Sarah Miles?known hitherto for her excellence in relatively simple, bitchy parts, and for her routine competence in all others-achieves genuine histrionic stature through a splendid fusion of dazed abulia and lurking vulnerability in her portrayal of Lady Franklin...

...there is a rising action and a haunting sense of injustice as the more likable crooks get it in the neck while the arch-villains prosper...

...But once you start scrutinizing it, you must analyze its workings more incisively, deeply and, yes, poetically than this film?whose makers may not even be aware of how corroded by class hatred they themselves are-begins to do...

...The ludicrous, piecemeal demolition of that noble Rolls contains in equal measure comic absurdity and an awesome lust for destruction that may, soon, cease to be inward-directed...

...Two other films are worth noting here for their curiously timely complementariness...

...Now he is over 50 and trying to live more or less straight-Except for a little dealing in stolen guns, where, however, he is strictly a go-between-not even the middleman, but a sort of middleman's middleman...

...It is interesting to see black and white trash run side by side and neck and neck, as it were, in brotherly competition...

...A neurotic young widow, Lady Franklin, hires a struggling chauffeur to drive her about in his gorgeous but as yet unpaid-for Rolls-Royce...

...The Hireling steers an uneasy and unsatisfying rriddle course, and is particularly remiss about developing its potentially revealing minor characters...

...Leadbetter, as the fellow is called, thinks that Helen Franklin is falling for him because she rides up front and indulges in candid talks with him...

...The plot is simplicity itself...

...The awkwardness of the staff's attempts to reconcile professional firmness with social deference toward their near-somnabulistic patient is fraught with eerie humor...

...Secondly, Eddie is not?whether as played by Mitchum, or else as conceived by the novelist, scenarist and director-an absorbing enough character...

...Gabin, at the right moment, would have been tragic...

...The pacing is good, the continuity tidy, the dialogue convincingly puny yet also racy...

...His final intoxication with liquor, love turned to hatred, and a sense of social outrage is brilliantly managed...

...Shaw, an old Pinterian hand, knows how to make inscrutability perform for him, how to let a single seed of irony sprout from a fallow field of noncommittal imperturbability, and how to be threateningly sexual even while executing some menial or humdrum task...

...But Miss Miles never obscures the basic decency that the character maintains even in her misguidedness...

...Peter Yates' film, based on a novel by George V. Higgins (said to be dry, tough, stark) and a script by Paul Monash, is effectively grey despite the color photography...

...Shakespeare, he tells us, was a johnny-come-lately: Africans were grooving on poetry a thousand years before...

...Even the fact that it takes place in Boston may add a little class to it...

...The opposite tendency, toward downplaying, characterizes The Friends of Eddie Coyle, a relatively superior gangster movie...

...The color cinematography by Michael Reed is moody and evocative, yet the effect is that of a dyspeptic British Brueghel training a lowering camera on a kind of Dance of Death-in-life...

...but he wears his social purpose, if not on his sleeve, on almost every frame of his film...

...The young director, Alan Bridges, a newcomer from television, has captured the atmosphere and look of England in the '20s most conscientiously...