Cinema
Exile in Coventry
By ISABEL QUIGLY
The Angry Silence. (Plaza.) — Let's Get Married.
(Carlton.) — Marie- °Linke. (Paris-Pullman.) PEOPLE'S nastiest qualities come out (as I remember from school) when they gang up on someone to force his exclusion from the group; especially, perhaps, when they are being right- eous about it, and when the group really matters to him. There are fashions in hatred as in everything else, and when hating someone becomes the thing to do it takes a brave person to break out and be- friend (or even defend) the outcast. The factory world in The Angry Silence (director: Guy Green; `A' certificate) reminded me extraordin- arily of school; I never saw such goings-on any- where since or thought quite that sort of cruelty appeared after adolescence. And in many ways the factory world isn't unlike school: there is the same sort of gang-life, close proximity, and prefectorial system; above all a similar attitude to authority and a similar hatred for anyone who appears to be on its side. My mates, right or wrong, seems to be the principle in both cases; and there is even a similar sort of social set-up in the sense that important people (to 1-me) generally= workmates, just as at school, at board- ing school at least, important people=school- mates, not the shadowy figures known outside, School ways of dealing with sneaks are not lin' like factory ways of dealing with those who break the (unwritten) rules, and in both places one determined hater, agitator or plain rumpus-maker can lead a lot of indifferent others by the nose, by playing on their fear, not of authority, but of the gang, the other `mates,' a far more fero- cious bogey than authority ever is,nowadays.And in both cases the authorities don't seem to like the outcast any better than the others do, because he stands for Trouble.
And industrially or scholastically trouble iS 3 bore for the authorities, and few individual feel' ings seem worth it. What does one man's papa' larity count, or even his dismissal, compared with the success or failure of a large contract? All the factory manager in The Angry Silence asks of his works manager is: 'No trouble.' If that means dismissing one tiresome workman, dismiss him, for whatever reason. And the works manager, who is the only outspoken figure in this very understating film, refuses to avoid trouble by sacrificing a man and a principle. Tom Curtis, the reluctant hero himself, is anything but a fire- brand. Up to a point all he wants is to keep out THE SPECTATOR. MARCH 18. 1960 of trouble; but the point is reached when he re- fuses to strike with the others, the gang turns on him, and he finds himself committed to a course that takes a martyr's constitution. He hasn't got it, so he suffers hard, taking it personally, not ideologically. They send him to Coventry, another thing one associates with school. Like the song:
I don't want to play in your yard I don't like you any more
it has such a childish ring about it that one mar- vels at it being used as a social weapon in adult lfe, and in this country. In the canteen, they move away as he comes to the table; in the work- ,s401), they pretend he doesn't exist. Everyone cuts am, even his own lodger; even the football team, that refuses to play with him. All this is worth hearing about, and a new Independent British company has a good subject and a bold enough theme: the theme being that organised labour is a herd that won't tolerate ,r(Illes—even mild and apologetic ones like Tom "Ills. But it would have said this a great deal more effectively if it had done so more firmly, aLnd, Put down the cruelty and ugliness to the nerd-nature itself, to people's weakness in crowds alld hysterical fear of getting out of step with the athgrs, rather than to the sinister man who turned LIP at the beginning and slunk out at the end, wearing the uniform spectacles and mean rat's face of the cinema's Left-wing intellectual. Sin- cere and sensible and obviously well-intentioned as it all is, it makes me wish I could say it was more than middlebrow and middling in result. Best Is the acting: Richard Attenborough, puzzled and incoherent as Tom, Pier Angell, warm and surprisingly unglossy as his Italian 41,,Ife• But script (by Bryan Forbes), story (by i!lhard Gregson and Michael Craig) and direc- tion are all at a similar level of talent : and again the words that apply are well-intentioned ones like: sensible, sincere. It would be pleasant to give whoops of joy over a film that is obviously Preoccupied (as so many aren't) with life as it goes on today, and tries so hard, and on the whole manages so well, to get across an authentic atmosphere. But it is all such a small-scale suc- cess that one feels vaguely let down; the subject seems to deserve bolder and brassier treatment, something altogether less unpretentious and un- Prejudiced, less soft-spoken. Politeness and good taste may be death to an impolite and tasteless theme.I just longed for an un-British outburst of indignation once in a while, just to make it seem more British and-less like a British film.
If Let's Get Married (director: Peter Graham Scott; `A' certificate) had even the secondary, sensible qualities one would be grateful : an loepter British comedy it would be hard to find, brighter Anthony Newley, potentially one of our urIghter young comedians, lost in a story, script and direction so abysmally awful that nothing need be said about them. And Marie-Octobre
,
A' certificate) is another gloomy example of the Incredible decline as a director of the once great buvivier. A Woman Like Satan, the last film of his to reach us, was bad in a loud, raucous, absurd sort of way; but this one is almost worse, befog unbearably tedious: a post-war Resistance whodunnit, with Danielle Darrieut. all in one room through one claustrophobic evening—and tt feels like it.
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