68 1 0 1EVIEW
OF THE ARTS
Duncan FaHowell on nudity with a pall of solemnity
Oh! Calcutta! Directed by Guillaume Martin Ancian. Stars: none. Classic, Piccadilly Circus. Classic, Victoria 'X' (GLC) (101 minutes) Callan Directed by Don Sharp. Stars: Edward Woodward, Eric Porter. Universal 'A' (106 minutes) Busting Directed by Peter Hyams. Stars: Elliott Gould, Robert Blake. London Pavilion 'X' (93 minutes) I Escaped from Devil's Island. Directed by William Witney. Star: Jim Brown. London Pavilion 'X' (87 minutes)
Is this the film of the show? If so, which show? New York? Honolulu? London? As though it were an abortion of his baby, Kenneth Tynan wants nothing to do with it and he wrote to me to say p.
"Fresh, or as fresh as can be expected, from its wither-wringing run in Alice Springs" (Kalgoorlie Recorder); "The nobs of all Amazonia giggled as the screwedup pink protestant masocho-id attempted to take off its clothes and make bricks from the straw of its repressions" (Orinoco Post); "My hustand and I held hands during some of the honkier sequences and later suffocating beneath the counterpane celebrated the ballet of love . . . " (Marjorie Thumps, Dames Monthly); "This expressionist sensuality, albeit qualified by the desespoir of even intimating the primal primacy within a proscenium, does nonetheless occasionally approach the symbiotic. Surely one can forgive nalVete whenithe intention is to help us reconnect at the cosmic navel through the demystification of sex into its central, potent energies" (The University of Oak Bluffs Review).
But an assault upon unorthodox press cuttings, publicity sheets, the thrust and thrust again of the media propaganda machine, threw little light upon what it actually was one was watching. Hot-foot from a tragic love affair and panting for a divertissement, was it the I Love Lucy show upon which one had inadvertently stumbled in the sepulchral basements of Wardour Street? The mechanical parlour roar of dubbed laughter like gritty waves breaking on a pebble beach was only the most blatant affinity with American television, but despite occasional glimpses of an audience in spectacles and crimplene it would have been impossible, as the dialogue contracted its syllables into only as many as could be accommodated within four letters, for Desi Arnaz Jr. to enter and tell Mom that he was just going down to the juice bar for a clierry shake. Or would it? The enigma thickened, the laughter stopped and we were floating in a wet Silvikrin dream such as girls experience after they have given up horses and before they graduate to sports cars, an Arcadian dance by the cast nu in a pretty wood: slow-motion flap of bristols and hamptons. It was done however with a far more exciting anthropological pull in Savages.
Judging by the doomy electrical soundtrack this silly rallentando was not intended as satire, but the dance factor is to a degree exonerated in a later pas de deux as Tarzan and Jane fight to preserve their egos before being consumed in the higher anonymiths of passion, maintaining their artsy balance all the while. Tarzan looks primitive enough although there is an unfortunate twitch of the actor's workshop about his facial expressions. But Jane surely gets her rocks off on this one. I wish I knew her name. Working from the press sheet she seems to be one of Raina Barrett, Nancy Tribush (oh, let it be Nancy), Samantha Harper, and she could earn a staggering. fortune in any of the world's capital cities.
I have not seen Oh! Calcutta! at the Duchess Theatre. On the entertainments page of the evening paper I notice that the Daily Telegraph man was knocked out by it for he is quoted as saying that "The Nudity Is Stunning." It sounds rather like the coma which overtakes certain South American rodents when they are cornered with no conceivable way out. In the picture the nudity is not stunning. It is a property of nudity to be nothing other than itself. What you do with it is another matter.
That for much of the time the cast wears no clothes is the least sensational feature in a film which to these jaded jowls is not sensational at all, alas. A little more grossness might have perked it up. Some of it is very funny, particularly one brilliant sketch about a couple new to wife/husbandswapping and a couple of old hands. It is the funniest thing I have yet seen in a preview theatre and like Andy Warhol's Pork it is straight from the tradition of Restoration comedy. When it is usual for the mere blowing of a nose to take on the quality of a major event, it was uncanny to hear the assembled preview-goers splitting their sides, although an alcoholic gentleman on my right didn't think it funny at all and told me to shut up.
Overall judgement time. Despite Kenneth Tynan's wish not to be mentioned in the same breath as the film, it is clear that the concept of it came from the mind of a rather jejune liberal who was nonetheless ahead in his day. Hilarious in patches, a pall of solemnity hangs over the whole which puts a drag on the film's ostensible glee philosophy. The sexual stance too is an extremely limited straight frontal heterosexual bang-bang, surely designed for distribution in those American States where by law the only permissible screw is that of a man lying directly on top of a woman face to face. But for all its archaic ham, it would be a pity to have continued in life without having seen the swinger sketch, the best moment in a film which makes notoriety nice. Or to put it another way, how can an attractive enter tainment, comparatively unremarkable, cause such a brouhaha?
British television as opposed to American gives us Callan, which simply pursues the character of the series at greater length and on a larger screen. Eric Porter is brought in as this week's MI5 nasty to give to the posters a flavour of star-billing. It is the familiar pouri of plot, sub-plot and counter-plot, unpleasant machinations in high places, centred on the activities of a prosperous gun-runner with a very good
library. It would be misleading to say that the pulse races but there is an excellent car chase ef an unfamiliar kind and an element of what used to be called "earthY realism" in film magazines of the early 'sixties. This has Edward Woodward, looking his age, as well as a natural if passing involvement with the beasties of the English countryside. EarthY realism of a flashier US sort is the approach of Busting, the story of two American vice cops wisecracking it out with junkies, gays and corrupt superiors. Elliott Gould acts very well up to a point but his off-the-cuff chatter mumbled through gum and a walrus moustache, rounded out by a rolling slouch which not only says that cops are human but also seems to have something to do with his general popularity as a film star in America, becomes more a limiting disguise than a flexible vehicle for improvised expletives. Jim Bravo in Devil's Island with a similar personality gets more mileage out of it but then he does have the advantage of a romantic location.
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