CINEMA
Horse feathers
PENELOPE HOUSTON
A Man Called Horse (Plaza, 'AA'). Goodbye Gemini (London Pavilion, 'X'). Downhill Racer ('A).
The pro-Indian Western might be a more cheerful sort of picture, all things considered, if it didn't so often turn out to be also the masochistic-white-man Western. Richard Harris gives the arduous, Brando-ish tradi- tion some support in A Man Called Horse, spending an unconscionable time in the early scenes running around with his trousers off and groaning heavily at the indignities in- flicted by his Sioux captors. Later, a teeth- gritting tribal initiation finds him skewered like a chicken and swinging from a rope's end; a more prolonged though hardly more painful ordeal than that of the several bereaved squaws, whose mourning consists of taking a hatchet to their own fingers.
Harris plays a British rambler in the America of the 1820s, one Lord John Morgan, who falls into Indian hands and decides that his best escape route is by way of himself becoming tribal chief. Wistful for the grouse moors, he shows a bemused Etonian sense of outrage when called upon to act as the squaw's beast of burden. But even in an Indian-oriented film, blue blood tells, and in the climactic battle with the Shoshone the playing fields of Eton prove their worth: Lord John pulls his troops back from their aimless tomahawking and lines them up in Agincourt archery formation.
A Man Called Horse seems in two, or even several, minds about just what sort of picture it intends to be. On the one hand there is Lord John and his glum search for identity through painful isolation; on the other, the suggestions of the King's Road Indian which creep into Harris's performance by way of his wardrobe, his elf-parodying accent and the exaggerated petulance of some of his reactions. A man called donkey seems at moments an apter title.
Elliot Silverstein's film is much concerned with the proud cruelty of Indian custom, with the cut of their tribal feathers and the insignia on their shields. The Indian village is a pretty place, like a nursery floor layout authentic to the last wigwam; and everyone, apart from Harris and a handy half-breed, talks defiantly untranslated Sioux. At the same time, the sight of Dame Judith Ander- son screwing her distinguished features into a mask of squawdom, and teetering about with a stick belabouring delinquent retainers, does somehow suggest that the Widow Twankey has enlisted in the tribe. It may be memories of Cat Ballou, Silverstein's engag- ing Western parody, which infiltrate A Man Called Horse with a certain levity. Or it may be that the Indians themselves, members of the Rosebud tribe (there's an echo for you). are a shade over-sophisticated for the job in hand. They look more at home examining their warpaint, or fingering looted furbelows. than when recalled to a sterner and more symbolic primitivism.
Goodbye Gemini concerns two terrible twins, played by Martin Potter and Judy Geeson, whose first act on returning to the ancestral mansion in Cheyne Walk is gigg- lingly to fling their Scottish housekeeper down the stairs. We move into a potentially incestuous private fantasy, and some prattle with the teddybear who shares it. There are encounters with what the film presumably takes to be devilishly decadent Chelsea swingers, a homosexual rape, blackmail, ritualistic murder and mental collapse. The girl takes refuge with Michael Redgrave. playing an exceptionally unfocused role as a shifty MP; the boy retreats cowering to the scene of the orgy—a Paddington hotel called. in the picture's only pretty touch, the Wood- land. Alan Gibson and Edmund Ward. director and writer, have perpetrated a film of which one can only say that it would probably look more vicious if it were less shamelessly silly. Already this year, we've seen Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly, Nega- tives and Entertaining Mr Sloane, all stories of deranged fantasists living in a lot of heavy interior decoration and insanely involved with their lodgers. Goodbye Gemini adds an exceptionally seedy fourth. Its economic problems are enough for the British film industry to cope with. I hesitate to suggest that maybe it needs psychiatric treatment as well.
Downhill Racer, due for a London open- ing later this year, is meanwhile being shown at various cinemas around the country. Its story isn't much—surly, countryboy skier wins an Olympic gold for America after demonstrating to everyone that he lacks team spirit. Story, however, is about the least of a picture that leaves most of its plot lines intelligently dangling, never quite letting them tauten into sports film cliché.
Brian Probyn's camerawork has great character: the film looks just as good off as on the snow. And the director, Michael Ritchie. lets the camera tell much of it, film- ing dialogue as well as racing scenes with a kind of -rv news verisimilitude—the face in the crowd suddenly swinging towards the camera, reporters fumbling identifications. the casual, unfocused atmosphere of stray moments at hotels and airports. The film has a feeling about the apparatus and concentra- tion and impermanence of sport; and about the ordinariness of champions (The world's full of them,' snaps the skier's dour father, during the weirdly effective episode of his return to his hick town home). Alert per- formances by Robert Redford, as the trucu- lent medal-winner, and Gene Hackman, as team coach, and a good deal of sharp, non- committal reportage on the public and private faces of sport.
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