eft, Cinema

Mean but good

Clancy Sigal

Jackson County Jail (London Pavilion) The Great Scout and Cathouse Thursday (Rialto) Walk with Love and Death (Electric, Covent Garden)

Mean Streets (Odeon Kensington, Islington Screen on the Green) Getting new kicks from old formulae is itself the basic Hollywood formula. Ever since Lillian Gish was almost raped by the Power-mad mulatto Silas Lynch in Birth of a Nation, N„von-l_jep'—woman in jeopardy— has been a movie staple. Until a few years ago the thrill came from the old-fashioned s,usPense inherent in watching a relatively Lnnocent girl at risk. But nowadays filmMakers figure we get off on seeing the New ‘Alornan—tough and independent—beaten, robbed, raped and humiliated. In Death vveekend the gang-ravished heroine found waYs to kill off her assailants one by one in the bloodiest possible ways. Jackson County Jugil (X certificate) is a little subtler. Though vette Mimieux does clobber her police rapist to death with a bench, the picture uses thhis moment of retaliatory fury to illustrate Ovv easy it is for anyone to step across the thin line that separates outlaw from respectable citizen. It's a neat, fast-paced, fairly ernPtY-headed movie that attacks the nerveends but leaves your mind untouched. Ms Mimieux is a Los Angeles career 70Man who takes guff from no man. Walkif.4 out on her chauvinist-pig boss and un

nbful husband, she heads her car for New

r ork and a fresh start. En route she's robbed 14.11. d slugged by a couple of spaced-out tinchhikers, attacked by a drunken cafe owner to whom she has appealed for help aod slung into Jackson County jail until the h.er,iff can check her identification. After Killing the night jailer who raped her, she numblY goes along with the escaping Texan iTurderer in the next cell because she doesn't nn°`A' what else to do. They'll never believe her story, the handsome young killer assures s° she might as well stick with him. t heir flight ends in the middle of a sma s ll own bicentennial parade, with Yvette all u,1" up and the Texan pumped full of police .ollets and sprawled under an American The irony, like director Michael MI Iller's depiction of rural America as popu'ated only by lecherous neanderthals, is Conventional and heavy.

t ,Yet efficiency is not to be despised, even in bi formula movie. There are some potentially

snteresting (and, more refreshingly, nonexu. al) exchanges between the two fugitives ile evi.h they're on the run. Yvette, middleLs even in adversity, firmly clings to the 'ellef that one phone call from her sister to

the police will clear up things. The Texan, tautly played by Tommy Lee Jones, knows better and gives her a chance to 'drop out and go under.' Briefly he becomes her mentor to the lawless chaos of the world— 'the whole goddam country is a rip-off.' She refuses to accept his thief's philosophy until he's killed in the streets. Then, for a final shot, the camera moves in close and freezes on her sitting wounded and manacled in the police car staring at Jones's body—she is dazed and shocked but there's also a new, unwelcome awareness in her face. It's a fadeout as simple as the rest of Jackson County Jail: and equally effective.

The Great Scout and Cathouse Thursday doesn't even try to upgrade the old stereotypes. This remarkably mean and tasteless 'spoof' western demeans, not satirises, its stock characters. If you fancy the idea of Oliver Reed playing a half-caste Indian with a venereal disease—'Cox the Pox'—who is bent on becoming a one-man epidemic in order to wipe out the white race, you'll like this picture.

At the moment, the best buys in town are re-runs. More accurately, John Huston's A Walk with Love and Death, made in 1969, has never been shown here before. it's at the new, cosy Electric Cinema Club at 29 King Street in Covent Garden—a seventyfive-seater with a food and wine bar and a bookshop. This welcome addition to London's growing number of alternative cinemas—such as the Essential, The Other, Gate, and Screen on Islington Green--has an authentic feel of what the early nickelodeons really were like, and I wish it luck. (Next week it has Keaton in The Cameraman, made in 1928.)

Taken from Hans Koningsberger's novel about two lovers wandering across France during the Hundred Years War, A Walk with Love and Death is a gentle, pacifist film that misfires but is worth seeing. Anjelica Huston, the director's daughter, is a titled young lady under the protection of a chivalrous student played by Assaf Dayan. In

Koningsberger's novel their romantic affair

highlighted the devastation of war; Huston mistakenly reverses the emphasis so that the

war becomes a too-pretty background for the romance. A Walk with Love and Death is what happens when a fine director decides to take a rest from commercialism in order to

make a 'sensitive' movie. The vigour and even some of the old technical skill are

missing. But as a kind of Strawberry State

ment of the Middle Ages, it has its moments. Martin Scorsese's 1973 Mean Streets (X certificate) is anything but pretty. It's a raw, loving, brutally powerful evocation of the director's old neighbourhood in Little Italy, a claustrophobically tight-knit section just below Greenwich Village. Harvey Keitel and especially Robert di Niro, the latter a halfcrazed corner boy, are tremendous. The honest intensity of Mean Streets makes it a better film, in my view,

than Scorsese's later successes, Alice Doesn't Live Here Any More and Taxi Driver. Seize this chance to see it again.