Cinema
Southern discomfort
Duncan FaHowell
Presumably the film A Streetcar Named Desire (Cinecenta, 'X') has been re-released to synchronise with the revival of the play in the West End. Having seen both, Vivien Leigh offers the more deranged, less dignified performance of Blanche, with both the whoredom and the schizophrenia nearer the surface which could, however, have something to do with the optics of the medium. Schooled early in Gone with the Wind she has much less trouble with her Southern twang than does Claire Bloom, particularly during the coquetry, and the subsidiary characters of her sister and her mother-loving beau are far more real than they ever seem on stage. Marlon Brando, of course, here saddled himself for the next
twenty years with the methodology of the brute cretin with the groin of gold, yet smashing plates, spitting food, raping bodies and souls with more conviction than he was ever to do again.
Kazan's film of the play, pure and simple, must be one of the finest sex movies publicly shown, despite the deletion of all reference to the homosexualism of Blanche's husband, making of Brando a post-war sex symbol
Spectator May 11, 1974 more blatant than Clark Gable was permitted to be. The trouble with this is that either you freeze yourself into a time-capsule 1110 Cary Grant and so paradoxicallY de-sex your way out, preservatives only enhancing an image of NAIrt ing powers, or you grow old with it like Gable and Brando and equally paradoxically remain 1101' bered. Maybe the Last Tango was Brando's attempt to purge the beast, successful only insofar as he was prepared to diminish himself, an exercise in masochism necessary for release into honest middle age. The casting of Streetcar was brilliantly apposite: Vivien Leigh, our lady of celluloid, pushing herself defiantly beyond the tireson;le stasis of theatrical propriety cahoots with a wild, conventinally inarticulate newcomer. It would be interesting to know how they jogged along off set. Hammer seem to be in a crisis of creativity at present. Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (As' toria, Charing Cross Road; New Victoria; 'X'), granting an icYlipped performance from Peter Cushing who clearly never permits anything so trite as plausibility t.0 mar his personal thrill in posing In black, finds it difficult to notch much higher than pantomime. Perhaps the economic crisis has struck them too, for in the very explicit surgical episodes one cannot feel they are slicing into anything more nauseating then cardboard and paint, the monster never looks other than someone called Dave Prowse in a large plastic bag with patches of nylon fur stuck to it; and a jar of slopPY eyeballs looked good enough to eat, trailing nerves notwithstanding. Plenty of blood and thunder but not one emetic ripple to disturb the slumber of the stomach, not a single delta wave to feed one's nightmares.
The script is the most monstrous thing here, having abandoned not only practical but also theoretical credibility But I always enjoy Hammer films. Their own internal myths are particularly amusing when they cannot rise to the occasion of the external ones, and at the finish, with Cushing in a butcher's apron sweeping up the detritus of his second failure, we are already being promised further attempts, only next time the Baron must pay more attention to biochemistry. Hammer should however receive a healthy kick in the knickers when the MorrisseyWarhol Dracula appears. I am already dribbling for that.
Sleeper (Odeon, Leicester Square, 'X') is Woody Allen's latest futuristic comedy. Instead of the gag stream, with one-liners attached like drawing pins to an all but irrelevant plot, Allen's comedy now flows with a mad interior logic. He enters hospital in 1973 and because of complications wakes up 200 years later. Working from this, Allen makes a film which is not only outrageously funny (cough and you miss a dozen jokes) but very sharp indeed: "Norman Mailer, he donated his ego to the Harvard Medical School . . ." And there is Brando again, courtesy of Diane Keaton.
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