ARTS
Old casbah's work is done
PENELOPE HOUSTON
For years we seem to have been reading, off and on about the cinema's wayward efforts to come to terms with the Alexan- dria Quartet. Scripts have been commis- sioned; screen rights changed hands; half a dozen writers at least must have begun hacking their way through the mirage of Lawrence Durrell's prose. Only Holly- wood's unfailing devotion to utterly untam- able novels, one felt, was keeping them go- ing: the whole thing becoming in itself a suitably Durrellian monument, one fantasy city's tribute to another. Then, suddenly, everything seemed set: Tunisian locations, Anouk Aimee playing Justine, and Joseph Strick, hot from Ulysses, as ringmaster. And, equally suddenly, that was off. Mr Strick moved swiftly to Tropic of Cancer, everyone packed their bags for Hollywood, and the veteran George Cukor stepped gamely in to direct a defiantly studio-bound Justine: Alexandria back on the back lot.
Obviously, doom set in early; but even if one mightn't choose to hit a film quite so palpably down, Justine (Odeon, Leicester Square, 'X') really is a very odd affair. As setting for a novel soaked, drenched, scented and overscented in awareness of place, the film wildly proffers some engag- ing postcard camels and pyramids, the odd alley and yashmak (infant prostitutes be- neath the yashmaks, but the old Come to the Casbah atmosphere survives them), and shots in which the camera moves over from a real ocean to come despondently to rest on painted boats becalmed on a painted backdrop. Colour values alter perplexingly from shot to shot; at one instant sharp studio lighting, at the next the same charac- ters peering through a grainy haze, keeping Alexandria firmly in the smog belt.
Admittedly, better films have survived worse: if the foreground works, one can overlook some fairly distressing background accessories. But in Lawrence Marcus's de- hydrated script, Justine becomes a flustered assortment of feverish characters, garbled. gun-running, and hopeful cavortings in- tended to represent the guile and decadence of ancient worlds. One needs that aquarium feeling, minnows and monsters swimming through filtered foliage, occasionally scar- ring themselves horribly and bleeding quietly to death in the warm water. Other- wise there are only the frayed ends of un- likely melodramas: death among carnival masks, death in the maize fields, Purse- warden crunching on a poison capsule, Melissa staggering off into the night. Cukor directs with a kind of weary tact, spry dashes over some of the plot's larger fissures, and an occasional grateful pounce on old- fashioned big scenes which tend to fall to pieces in his hands.
To stand any chance of working at all, the film needs the kind of incessantly at- mospheric, watchful direction which leaves the audience to make its own discoveries; and it gets the stubborn, star-conscious tidi- I ness of old Hollywood. Anouk Aimee's smiling Justine conjures up only a few hid- den shallows. Anna KarMa's Melissa teeters palely on the edge of a performance; and it seems a tactical blunder to cast two lead- ing ladies whose English too often wavers between the ungainly and the barely intel- ligible. As Darley, Michael York looks like an undergraduate warily reconnoitring the antic high life of North Oxford—an impression perhaps heightened by sug- gestions of the Accident don in Dirk Bo- garde's Pursewarden. 'Not a day passed that he didn't delight us with his savage wit', says Darley in one of his fits of phrase making. But if there isn't much savage wit, here or elsewhere, Bogarde at least gives a thunderingly professional performance, all restrained misery and seedy playfulness, a kind of Guy Burgess figure permanently haunting the foreign service.
Goodbye, Columbus (Plaza, 'X') has what Justine transparently lacks: a sense of direc- tion, a clear, cool purposefulness about just where it is going, even if that isn't finally very far. It is a film trailing, certainly, in the wide wake left by The Graduate, but perhaps in the long run more enjoyable because less compulsively set on brilliancy. If the director, Larry Peerce, lacks Mike Nichols's gift for contained hysteria, he works shrewdly in a narrower area, be- tween the almost real and the not intoler- ably caricatured.
The opening gives you the swift, reliable feeling of a film dealing a none too mar- vellous hand as though all its cards were trick-takers: frightful cousin Doris crouched by the country club pool, a mass of un- gainly sunburn, sulking her way through War and Peace: Aunt Gladys wailing from the front porch; and Brenda Patimkin, the spoilt Jewish rich girl, playing maddening tennis while the sun goes down and her ad- mirer from the public library sits patiently waiting, prepared to be bedazzled but alert to disenchantment. Jewish suburbia, defen- sive, over-fed, glutinous and cynical, is not so much explored or derided in the film as taken for granted; and the script which Arnold Schulman has adapted from Philip Roth's short novel has a close-up feeling for the succulent awfulness of sticky meals, fat children gorging themselves at a grotesque wedding, all the possessiveness and dis- consolate fretfulness of those bright facades.
One could do, actually, with rather more of this, and perhaps less of the tanned idyll of the country club, sun-dazzled camera- work, slow strolls away from camera, mid- night bathes, all the Hollywood ritual of audience-seduction. But the film is very 'conscious of its packaging, and certainly knowing enough to appreciate that it may be useful to let the audience in on its aware- ness. Already, the country club is becoming a kind of Betjeman annex, and Brenda Patimkin is a Westchester Joan Hunter- Dunn in contact lenses and a thousand dol- lars' worth of plastic nose surgery. Ali MacGraw, a poised new actress, plays her like a girl fighting a rearguard action against turning into her mother, alternately crisp and wilting. Agreeable performances too, from Richard Benjamin, Jack Klug- man and, as the athlete for whom nostal- gia begins at twenty, Michael' Meyers.
The American four-car dream, ambushed in full cry in Goodbye, Columbus, is going out with a whimper in Easy Rider (Classic, Piccadilly Circus, 'X'). This mini-odyssey on motorbikes clanks with the tinny tit of self pity; but at the same time it is : unmistakably a film to see, if only b cause for once a view of the drop-o: generation has not been imposed from ou side, exploited for flower-power jokes an infant psychedelic shocks. Two hippie (Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, respe' tively producer and director of the film) s out to ride from Los Angeles to Ne' OrJeans. Star-spangled and buckskinnet a souped-up Captain America and Buffal Bill, they carry in their gas tanks th loot from a successful venture in cocair smuggling, though their massive indolent and inarticulacy might leave one wonderin how they ever managed to pull off anythin so decisive.
Along the way they pick up a marvellot character: an alcoholic small-town lawye impeccably played by Jack Nicholson, wh digs out his old football helmet and talc( to the road, an incoherent but articular dreamer (Terry Southern was presumab responsible for his share of the script) in film which has otherwise practically sure' dered the power of speech. Part of the wa• ward appeal. of this often inexpert an sometimes tryingly portentous movie is th: it can encompass such stray encounter The rest is its feeling for landscape: tt. dark fields of the Republic rolling o under the night, the sense of ut fulfilled potential, the corroded junl
yard remnants of the lost dream. An od.. place, no doubt, for the perpetual American myth of the untarnished land to crop up
again; but in spite of the ghastly Lso caper- ings in New Orleans, Easy Rider is a small,
despondent, not insignificant journey in pursuit of vanishing hopes. In a simple way, the film is about American space: no bike- rides up the MI are going to reproduce it.
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