Now we are six_ 'Christopher Hudson With a nice appreciation

of the intellectual level of Jesus Christ Superstar ('A' Paramount) Norman Jewison has staged his film of it in a sandpit. Under the hot Israeli sun a group of kids tumble out of an old bus beside the pillars and ruined walls of a Roman temple site. With much laughing, chanting and leaping up and down they unload the props, including a large wooden Cross. Pilate makes a face at the camera; Herod, prematurely obese, ambles his paunch into the shade. Christ, a weakly handsome youth with a wisPY beard and slightly watery eyes, raises his arms to be robed in

• white — which is when the kids recognise the superstar in their midst. " Ho-sanna, hey-sanna, sauna, sanna-ho " they sing and stamp in the sand and swish palm fronds in the air, while Judas grumbles on a nearby hill and the black-robed, globe-helmeted Pharisees look on disapprovingly.

Everyone had a good time, according to the handouts, and the resulting pantomime, complete with principal boy, is worth a hundred minutes' attention for the visual delights of Norman Jewison's direction and Douglas Slocombe's photography. But we have only to compare Superstar with Jewison's film of Fiddler on the Roof to see what a larrientable. mess this is. The music isn't as good; the lyrics are incomparably worse. "It was nice but now it's gone," sings Jesus to the rudelyawakened disciples in Gethsemane. After Judas manages to hang himself on the only tree for miles around, a choir of girls' voices sings, 'SO long, Judas: so long, Judas: so long, Judas,' which seems an inadequate comment on the only remotely interesting role in the film. As for the religious, holy, emotional, spiritual, feeling in Superstar, call it what you will, it couldn't swell out a dried pomegranate. Unlike Fiddler in which the acting and the songs came together under his direction into a film beautifully expressive of love and charity, the one song in Superstar of any emotional contentwhatever is slap in the tradition of romantic musicals — Mary Magdalene dolefully considering '1 Don't Know How to Love Him?' against a fading sunset.

I am driven to the conclusion that the original popularity of Jesus Christ, Superstar must have bi-en entirely due to the naivete of its conception, which allowed its natural audience to enjoy it as a POP concert with a largely inaudible message, and prompted adults who should have known better into attitudes of patronising kindliness. "How honest to God!" one can hear them, "How simple, " like a child's painting!" (or one of

those luridly coloured tracts missionaries hand out to the uneducated). In fact the only simplicity M Superstar is the unerring simPhcity of the logic behind its invention. This goes as follows: contemporary cult phenomena in the West promote a suspension of reason, often of language too, and regression to a state of infantile acceptance. The pop.star is the exemplary cult figure of today.

o Jesus can be presented as a

simple-minded, unconsciously

Powerful raver who attracts tears and squeals, hysterical loyalty and

self-obsessed adulation, like any

famous pop singer invited to air his views in public. It doesn't matter, therefore, that the most common expression on the face of Jesus is one of petulant discontent and that he gives vent to little s9ueal5 of rage when things get difficult: it is the natural de meanour of a child whose toy is broken, and the children about him wail in sympathy. The entire production deserves to be crystallised in gelatine and set up beside the Christmas crib in churches to remind us that infancy is not always to be venerated. The other film of the week presents infantilism of quite another

sort. The Last of Sheila ('AA'

ABC1) has a film producer inviting aboard his yacht six Hollywood Personalities one year after they all attended a party he gave at Which his wife Sheila was killed by a hit-and-run driver. He makes them play a party game in which each of the players is given a card that reveals, anonymously, an unpleasant secret about one of the others. After the producer has his head bashed in, quite rightly, the

rest compare revelations in an attempt to defend themselves against the accusation of murder.

It is a far-fetched story, allowing irnprobable deductions to lead to

an unlikely solution. As for the acting, it is a case of dog eat dog: the cast, led by Dyan Cannon, Laquel Welch, James Coburn, xichard Benjamin and James Mason, play the mindless, childish

gossips of Hollywood society with a proper fidelity to the characters.