Cinema
White Mischief (`18', selected cinemas)
Belgravia in the bush
Hilary Mantel
There is an unsavoury ditty which runs through Michael Radford's film: 'E is for everyone hot and in season/ F is for f—ing we like with good reason/ K is for Kenya, kisses and all. . . .' It falls from the lips of Alice de Janze, bard of the Happy Valley set, who is played here by Sarah Miles in her dippiest vein; it captures the spirit of a film which might have been entertaining nonsense, but seldom rises to that height.
The story behind the film is well known. In 1941 Sir 'Jock' Delves Broughton was tried and acquitted in Nairobi for the murder of Lord Errol, his wife's lover. Perhaps he was guilty, but lots of others aggrieved husbands and discarded mistres- ses — had a motive. It is a murder mystery in which the criminal's identity is not so important as the crime's glitzy, decadent background. Cyril Connolly was fascinated by the case, and in 1982 James Fox published a book about it; it is an exem- plary piece of research, but it leaves a nasty taste in the mouth, because it tells one more than one needs to know about a set of people who — on the evidence as we have it — were both despicable and boring.
Diana Broughton was a femme fatale from Hove, the daughter of a dental 'Hello, good evening and welcome...' surgeon. 'Her pale eyes', Connolly wrote, `would be called cold by those on whom they had not smiled, her mouth hard by those who had not kissed it.' This is heady stuff: her teeth, perhaps, were also very wonderful, but the critic does not spare them a line. She was 26 when she arrived in Kenya, and had married (for money) a man 30 years her senior; and in the film we see her join a fast set who inject themselves with exciting substances, cross-dress for dinner, and wear snakes around their necks. She soon learns to shoot pineapples off a fence, a skill not in request in Sussex. Charles Dance as Erroll, the colony's resident stoat and male gold-digger, has not much to do but look like himself, which he does fairly creditably; Greta Scacchi, as Diana, has nothing to do but look like herself wearing a quantity of red lipstick for the casting director has not sought to replicate those original lips. They are a handsome pair, but we do not know if their affair is a grand passion or a spoiled girl's petulant whim. 'I want you to save me from myself,' Errol says, but it may not be a one-off sentiment.
The film is prettily shot, but — although occasionally a cow keels over and a black chap comes through waving a spear — for much of the time we might be in Belgravia. The ladies don't sweat, they don't perspire, and even in the heat of sexual passion they barely glow; they must have had some wonderful kind of face powder, the secret of which has long been lost to expatriate society. Could any amount of sang-froid, ready cash and arrogance keep the conti- nent so successfully at bay? In the real Africa, swanning out to a party in seduc- tive mode, one is apt to be bitten by a cattle tick — or something nastier. Joss Ackland is convincing and pitiable as the dull, dim Broughton, and there are splen- did cameo performances from, amongst others, John Hurt, Susan Fleetwood and the late Trevor Howard; but it would be no surprise if Joan Collins were to swan through. The costumes are, as the charac- ters say, 'to die for'.
It doesn't really matter that the film mangles the facts; what destroys it is lack of tension. After Errol's death, and the trial, it drifts along to an unsatisfactory conclusion; indeed there is something per- functory and offhand about the whole enterprise. We get little perspective on the characters, though we are given a dig in the ribs every so often to remind us that Britain is at war and that the self-indulgent colonists are unpatriotic rotters. Their way of life, too, is coming to an end: in bloodstained clothes, Diana wanders through a graveside cocktail party. But the scent of corruption is absent; and that is the very. thing which should compel our unwilling fascination. It is pointless to open this ancient charnel-house, then use it to play out an episode of Dynasty.
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