Cinema
Virgin Soil
By ISABEL QUIGLY Flamenco and As Long as the Head Beats. Continentale.) — A Terrible Beauty. (Lon- don Pavilion.) You don't need to know much about it to see two things about film preser- vation (film archives, the cinematic equivalent of librarianship). One, the fact that what you are preserving is (like people) getting- nearer to death and disintegration all the time; is something alarmingly unstable compared With, say, books or music or painting. And two, the scrappiness of what you have managed to Pickle away (always precariously, too, and liable to decay or expensive treatment to keep it alive), the higgledy-pigglediness of records, above all the gaps. Number I of Volume I of the Journal of the Society of Film History Research (a hope- ful filler of gaps) has just reached me: a publica- tion with a modest style and admirably immodest, or at any rate immoderate, aims.
Have you ever tried looking up a film subject? Reading round anything connected with the cinema? Not anything very abstruse, even? Well, if you have, you'll be dashing off to join the Society (membership LI a year from the Hon. Treasurer, Ronald S. Raddon, 63a Atheneum, Whetstone, N20) out of sheer frustration. Because nine times out of ten you can't, as things are now, find out the facts, simply because nobody knows them. It's as simple as that. No one has done the long, dull slogging that accumulates facts and figures and references and names and dates and lets you know for certain what was What and when. There it is: virgin soil for the researcher, and the new journal manages to make it sound pretty exciting, like tracking in the jungle or The Quest for Corvo. There are some excellent hints for researchers on the way to approach their Subject: practical suggestions and concrete ex- amples of what to do and how. There is an interesting (and again, modest and homely-sound- ing) scheme drawn up in Holland for research into the early days of Dutch filming that makes the whole idea seem like a jolly piece of detective work. There are bright ideas by the dozen, but Where, oh where, are the researchers? Who are they, these patient, passionate souls with (pre- sumably) private incomes who are going to have the time (as well as the urge) to delve into the not very far away but already disintegrating past? I don't mean to jeer, I just want to know. Cer- tainly we need them; but where in heaven's name are they? Could the industry itself be persuaded to back them? That seems the best bet, finan- cially, but may sound crazily optimistic.
Anyone who (like me) tends to think that in Matters of dignity, deportment, natural taste, Inborn manners, the tragic sense of life, etc. etc., Spaniards are just born on a higher shelf than everyone else might have a look at Flamenco (director : Antonio del Amo; 'V certificate) as a mild corrective. Because 'here is a Spanish film so ear- and eye-splittingly vulgar that -Liberace would be hard put to it to compete; in fact, though you wouldn't think a child could have the smallest resemblance to Liberace, Joselito Jimenez does manage a rather similar overwhelming effect, especially at his final appearance in a polka- dotted silk shirt and satin bow tie, before an audience composed mostly of stout middle-aged women cheering their heads off. Poor child, his extraordinary voice, with just the harsh, pene- trating, brazen assurance, so characteristic of Spain, that either stabs you with delight or makes you cringe with alarm, has been used on mostly such revolting songs and coupled with such a frantic absurdity of style (a completely meaning- less use of hands, for instance—sawing through the air about every half-minute, as regular as clockwork, even when he's singing in the dark at a Holy Week procession or bursting into song alone on a mountain top) that the only effect of his spectacular (and pretty wonderful) brays is a stunned feeling of what a waste it all is. There's a crumb of a story under the rags to riches non- sense—Joselito's father teaches him flamenco singing and despises the mush his commercial exploiter teaches him—but nothing is made of it and even the charming blind heroine can't make up for the charmless role they have assigned to poor Joselito. Even the children's affection is observed with a grown-up leer, so that they end looking like those little celluloid dolls with baby faces and adult clothes.
With it goes As Long as the Heart Beats (direc- tor: Alfred Weidermann; 'LP certificate), a West German film with 0. E. Hasse, well acted, sincere and unsensational but pretty stodgy going; asking what you are to do under sentence of death with cancer, and answering that, for one thing, you appreciate your family more than you used to, and for another, they appreciate you; so that with all that extra appreciation you begin to feel more hopeful about things. It's one of those films that, like some people, you hesitate to call a bore be- cause they have all sorts of unboring qualities; but that in practice are far more lowering than an outrage like Flamenco. Well, they make a pair: the goodish dull and the amusing horror; but hardly set each other off.
And to round up the international scene we have Ireland in 1940, and A Terrible Beauty (director: Tay Garnett; '111' certificate) made on the spot with the minor parts taken by Irish actors (Cyril Cusack and Nial McGinnis among them), and the main ones taken by imports trying to outstrip them with a thick tongue. A pity to see Robert Mitchum, who can (though one tends to forget it) be moving, made nonsense of by his voice and mop of IRA curls to the eyebrows, and teamed with Anne Heywood, the epitome and essence of all British film starlets, saying things like our beautiful Oirland.' But there: that most imitable-sounding of voices (so much more than a mere accent) is in fact, when you try it out, inimitable.
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