CINEMA
Agitato
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. (Odeon, Marble Arch, 'A' certifi- cate.)—The Deadly Affair. (Columbia, 'X' certificate.)
rr HE new Odeon at Marble Arch boasts an I escalator, closed-circuit television (a monitor screen frowns from above the pay-box), and so much international airport decor that one is faintly surprised not to find seat-belts. There's a feeling that the whole cinema might be poised for a fully automated take-off : in flight movies hovering over Edgware Road.
As a setting for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, it seems by no means inappropriate: a slight sense of dislocation from the automated atmosphere answering back to a good deal of dislocation on the screen. On the surface, there is the unmistakable visual style of Richard Lester: cool, glancing, playing off solid blocks of brilliant background colour against close-ups of distraught, haggard middle age, slicing the action so fine that his actors always seem to be running to keep up. A Lester film remains the closest thing on the screen to perpetual motion, and his best jokes are one-shot enchantments of high-speed idiocy, like the Roman soldier on guard duty who's mistaken for a gardener and makes a briskly hopeless digging movement with his spear, the horse found sitting dolefully among senators in a Turkish bath, the pigeon clattering to the ground under the weight of the message it's supposed to deliver. It is typical of Lester to film a romantic song as though he were guying a commercial (the heroine in fluttering white, skipping through sunlit woodland), then to set one of the plot's female impersonators loose in the same setting, piling parody on pastiche.
Beneath all this, though, remains the skeleton of a stage comedy structured on quite different principles: the timeless Jewish cracks about nervous, wizened men and domineering wives: the one-track humour—each character caught up in some obsessive concern of his own, so that any encounter between two people becomes a collision. The actors need time to ignite these slow-fuse jokes, especially Zero Mostel in the
expansive role of the conniving slave Pseudolus. But time is something Lester is not giving away, and his throwaway technique sends jokes winging to the boundary before the audience can field them. Incidents and performances have their own sly, engaging absurdity, such as the legion's martial advance into a fusillade of cabbages from the market stalls, Michael Hordern's spry playing of the harassed Senex, Roy Kinnear's revue sketch as a golf pro %%ho has strayed into the gladiators' training school. Then it's back again to face-pulling slapstick, a line of knockabout so at odds with the visual sophistication that it's as though Carry On had joined forces with Vogue.
In The Deadly Aflair, the Le Carre world of conscience-stricken intelligence agents, the private torment and the professional stab in the back, retains its engrossing melancholy. The agent in question is one Dobbs, who divides his contempt between himself, his devious trade, and the wife he can neither live with nor forget. A routine security check, into a Foreign Office man's undergraduate Communism, ends in an apparent suicide. Dobbs doesn't believe it; neither does the retired police inspector called in to help; in an informal complicity of professionalism, they set out to investigate.
The beating-up in darkest Battersea, the double climax of-murder and betrayal, are nothing new. Resolutely grown-up thrillers have conventions almost as rigorous as the bang-bang Bond kind. But what distinguishes the film is the amount of very solid carpentry that has gone into Sidney Lumet's direction, Paul Dehn's script, the muted, grey-green colour photography of a reserved, suburban London. Cars trail each other along those sad, permanently damp streets that flash out into sudden views of the river. The inspector (a brilliant show of weary resolution from Harry Andrews) lives gently among a menagerie of small animals, and beats a suspect mercilessly to get a story out of him. Husband and wife quarrels end in blurred, blank silences. In the film's best scene, when Dobbs (James Mason) calls on the Foreign Office man's widow, Simone Signore( makes the pouring of a cup of Nescafe look like a gesture of frozen despair. This is the real Le Carre country, a meeting of middle- aged survivors on the barbed wire of their ideological frontier.
PENEI.OPE HOUSTON
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