CINEMA
Slick dick
PENELOPE HOUSTON
Romance for Trumpet (Paris-Pullman, 'A') Bezhin Meadow (Paris-Pullman, V') Last week's film about shady goings-on in the London police force had the unmistakable—so far as it goes, authentic—look of 1968: a plas- tic dazzle, slightly faded and grubby around the edges. This week it's back to old New York, even shadier police doings, and the solid, brown-varnished style of conventional Holly- wood. The difference is striking enough to make you appreciate what the ever-hopeful Americans are after when they invest in the London look; and also to remind you that Gordon Douglas, the soundly craftsmanlike director of The Detective, made his first film before the Second World War.
Although things are changing, Hollywood has been possibly the most middle-aged movie town in the world; and The Detective is a fair example of an ageing American cinema puffing and huffing after its new censor-free permis- siveness—the licence to keep calling a spade a spade (or, in this case, a homosexual a homo- sexual). An attraction of the old nameless vices of the classic thrillers was that in being name- less they remained speculative: it took a pleasurable degree of sheer ingenuity from both writers and audience to work out just what was supposed to be going on in some of those shuttered rooms and furtive bookshops. Solemn expilicitness is now the rule, and Abby Mann's script for The Detective is dutifully outspoken. Basically, however, it's the old story of the one honest cop up against the establish- ment and his own colleagues—and too harried, in this instance, to realise that he is sending the wrong homosexual psychopath to the chair for a particularly unappetising murder.
The film leans heavily on the fact that Frank Sinatra is one of the few surviving stars (no Bogart, but the best we've got) who can speak up persuasively for the unbent cop or the incorruptible private eye: it's a matter of the lines about the eyes, a way of walking, a used, hardened style suggestive of integrity worn paper-thin. Still, it's hard slogging in a film which tramps through the crime routines—the chipped paint in the detective's office, the flash- ing of police badges and the ambushes in dark garages—and has to find time to glower over the more specialised 1968 movie problems. The detective's wife (Lee Remick) is a nympho- maniac, as she keeps telling him; even the nice English girl (Jacqueline Bisset) whose husband jumped off a roof has to mention casually that she used to take drugs. It seems symptomatic of the mixing of conventions that during one of his wife's more fraught revelations the detec- tive should be walking about his own house with his hat on—as though he were clinging bravely and against disturbing odds to the identifiable badge of his trade. One scene in the film is really rather striking: a small episode in which a negro detective is
discovered browbeating a cowering, naked sus- pect. He got this undress idea, he cockily ex- plains, from watching newsreels of the ss at work. This is real low cunning. The script- writer knows we expect the negro to be sym- pathetic, as up to that point he has been: black men in liberal Hollywood films always have to be that much better behaved than other people. Therefore, a fairly irrelevant scene has been doled out to the negro, rather than to one of the thuggish white cops, to give a double jolt. And the disconcerting thing is that it does,
up to a point, work, even though we know that they know that we know the calculation in-
volved. A scene like this is revealing about conditioned reflexes, and how they can be worked on: it leaves one feeling that The Detective is connecting in other ways than it perhaps realises with the ailments of a sick society.
The Czech cinema in the last few years has been outstanding: enough films (including some as yet unseen here, such as Forman's Like a House on Fire, or Nemec's A Report on the Party) that give a sense of the wit and resolu- tion and dour inventiveness of their style of resistance. Film-makers have reminded us that they live in the city of Masaryk, and of Kafka: there is a muted, inquiring, guilelessly ingeni- ous quality about Czech cinema which is en- tirely unique. Which makes it seem a pity that London cinemas failed to react to an occa- sion; and that the Paris-Pullman, though no doubt doing its best, should have managed to come up only with the platitudinous Romance for Trumpet. Directed by one of the Czech cinema's veterans, Otakar Vavra, it tells a sad, ballad-like Central European tale about a half- hearted affair between a young student and the girl who works the roundabout at a travelling fair, which ends when the student spends what should have been the night of their elopement laying out his newly dead grandfather. It is all carefully worked out, perhaps rather too care- fully, with its built-in melancholy and its sound track so meticulously throbbing with the sounds of summer: it seems to be thinking about evocative images rather than finding them. Not a bad film; but somehow at the moment irrele- vant as well as minor.
With it there is the half-hour Soviet recon- struction of all that remains of Eisenstein's
Bezhin Meadow. This is a film with a famous—
or infamous—history: Eisenstein at his most formalist up against the sternest Stalinist doc- trines of mid-1930s socialist realism. The film was begun, then halted, then extensively rewrit- ten, and finally shelved. Eisenstein wrote cring- ingly and humiliatingly about his readiness to seek the party's help in mending his individualist ways. Then, during the war, an air-raid de- stroyed the film itself, apart from stills and stray clippings. Sergei Yutkevich and Naum Klei- mann have lovingly rebuilt these relics, though the commentary (presumably a direct transla- tion from the Russian) is notably evasive about any details of the famous disputes. Here, with- out movement, is the feel of Eisenstein: threatening old faces, towering gestures, the onward march of the tractor army, a kind of half-way house between The General Line and Ivan the Terrible. The actual story of Bezhin Meadow is exceptionally odd and unlikeable: about a small boy on a collective farm who sneaks on his reactionary family and gets shot by his vengeful Old Testament sire. Hard to feel, really, that the bomb which fell on the Moscow Archive destroyed a masterpiece.
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