Contemporary Arts
THE most interesting new film of this week can be found only at Cambridge; the censor's ban, reinforced by the decision of the LCC, has kept, and will keep, it out of London. It seems a pity. The Wild One is a study in violence, and it is a film in which no one precisely is punished because no one pre- cisely is to blame. But the picture neither condones violence nor takes it for granted; and the censor's attitude seems due less to a fear that the majority might be shocked than that the minority inclined to hooliganism might be further corrupted.
From the credit titles, The Wild One states its theme : the young motor-cyclists, goggled and black-jerkined, roaring down the road in near-military formation, arc out for blood. Aimlessly, to fill in an idle hour, they will descend on a small town, crowd into its saloons, stage their gang fights in its main street, until their restless boredom finds its outlet in casual destruction, All this—the juke-box idiom, the disinterested passes at the local girls, the ritual of the fight between the two club leaders—the
film brilliantly records. It is through observa- tion, incisive and unstressed, that Laslo Benedek and John Paxton, the director and writer, come disturbingly to grips with this particular social problem. Then the story deserts the gang to concentrate on its leader, Johnny (Marlon Brando); he is attracted to a girl, and revealed as not wholly unsympathetic; he becomes the target for the town's anger when the aroused citizens form a lynching party. The film goes a long way around to make the point that violence breeds violence, and in doing so loses its own way, taking refuge in some conventional melodramatics and an un- certain and equivocal ending. There remain, though, the general tone, appalled but unsen- satiOnal; the vicious tension of the early passages; and, as one now expects from every film in which he appears, the central fact of Brando's performance.
Johnny does not develop as does Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, and the relation- ship with the girl, designed to throw light on his character, in fact proves the film's weakest part. But Benedek is a more reticent director than Elia Kazan, and less inclined to lay all his emotional cards on the table; as presented here, the Brando characterisation of the in- articulate contemporary hero may appear slighter, but it has also a subtler authenticity. Passage Home begins by sketching in char- acters who might develop interestingly—the morose and unpopular captain of a cargo ship, the stranded English girl taken on as a passenger at a South American port—and ends with a rip-roaring storm sequence, which some- how solves whatever problems the voyage has created. Atmosphere, in other words, gives way to action, and on neither level does this sea story really work. But the director, Roy Baker, keeps a rather indeterminate plot from drifting too far off course, and there arc sound perform- ances by Peter Finch, as the captain, and Cyril Cusack, as a trouble-making steward. Diane Cilento, although not entirely one's idea of a distressed British governess, remains an actress worth watching.
Disney's new nature film deals with the wild life of the great American grasslands, with the ingeniously observed habits of birds, bisons, cougars, coyotes and the engaging and cour- ageous little burrowing animals known as prairie dogs. The pictures in this series sustain a precarious balance between intelligent popularisation and tricked-up vulgarity; and, for the most part, The Vanishing Prairie remains on the right side of the line.
PENELOPE HOUSTON
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