Cinema
Death wish
Clancy Sigal
Islands in the Stream (Plaza 2)
The Best Way to Walk (Scene Leicester Square, Screen Islington Green) John Updike called it a gallant wreck of a novel. Franklin Schaffner's version of Ernest Hemingway's Islands in the Stream (A certificate) is a muddled, nervous compromise of, a film caught between overrespect for a deeply flawed but powerful text and unwillingness to honour the strangely coherent logic of this structurally (and emotionally) complex story. , The team of Schaffner and George C. Scott worked superbly well in Patton, partly because their hero was all of a piece, a messianic and relatively uncomplicated warrior who was happy doing what he did best, killing people. Hemingway's protagonist, the painter Thomas Hudson, is a broken man who dcresn't know it. Awkwardly, in his relationships with his three visiting sons, his work (he's switched to welded sculpture, which looks fairly ghastly in the film) and the sea, he tries to resolve the painful contradictions of being a burned-out artist, an absent father, a lover terrified of the necessary surrenders of love, and a war-thirster far from the battle zones of World War Two. Of course Hemingway couldn't resolve all this, either for himself or his alter ego Hudson. In Iffe he blew his brains out in Ketchum, Idaho; in the unfinished, tenuously linked novellas of Islands in the Stream he not only kills off Hudson, but gratuitously slaughters his three sons as well.
There is much literary skill in Hemingway's book. His false and sentimental attitudes are redeemed by flashes of the old lightning where he describes the sea, deepsea fishing and the simple pleasures of men drinking together. And there is 'a curious but undeniable integrity in the very shallowness of Hemingway's attempt to explore, relationships with his sons who are made to talk embarrassingly like midget Hemingways (the picture actually humanises them) but which does represent his most serious effort at breaking out or his isolation as man and artist. His failure, I think, is directly due to his romantic (and masochistic) notion of maleness, to be achieved via trials of suffering or not at all. But paradoxically, Hemingway's best writing came out of this death-besotted machismo that eventually ruined his art and killed him.
On present evidence Franklin Schaffner and his scriptwriter, Denne Bart Peticlerc, wouldn't recognise a paradox if it jumped out of the water and bit them. They set out to make an uncomplicated movie and ended up with a simple-minded one. No one will
ever make a good movie out of Hemingway merely by cutting, compressing and rearranging, as they do here. The baldfaced silliness of so much of Hemingway's dialogue, which one sometimes forgives when knit together by his enormous technical knowhow, just sounds damn ridiculous on the screen. Hawks in To Have and Have Not and Robert Siodmak in The Killers made good 'Hemingway movies' because they weren't afraid to do it their way instead of his. Even bad Hemingway can make marvellous cinema only if the makers aren't afraid to trust their box-office, instincts, to be cheap and 'commercial and vulgar, and devil take the hindmost.
By refusing even to try to come to terms with the ossified madness at the heart of Hemingway's dilemma his deep, psychotic yearning for death, punishment and blood — Schaffner and his writer are cheap and vulgar in the worst sense. Instead of hoking up an entertaining narrative out of Hemingway's chaos, they try to wash away his sins of the spirit with good taste and discretion — and a few choice lies. For example, Hemingway's old prostitute Honest Lil is an obscene wreck of a woman; in the movie she's *a rather petite Florence Nightingale figure. And the book's denouement — virtually its whole point — has Hudson going unasked, into personal combat against Nazi submariners off the Cuba coast for the primitive naked joy of it. In Schaffner's film Hudson fights the baddies because he is carrying a boatload of Jewish refugees. For hogwash, this beats Hemingway at his worst.
George C. Scott, grizzled and .barrelchested and self-pitying as the author himself, is pretty good in there playing Hudson. But, as the Old Man might have said, the sentimental sons of bitches killed me well and truly.
Set in a 1960 summer camp in the Auvergne, Claud Miller's The Best Way to Walk (X certificate) is more successful .at defining manhood under stress. Philippe is the transvestite, not necessarily homosexual 'sensitive' son of the pompous camp director, Marc a he-man PE counsellor repelled but also fascinated by Philippe's effeminacy and the echoes it sets up in his
own conventionally masculine psyche. The title refers to a rousing, conformist, French boys' marching song (`The best way to walk
'is our way to walk which Marc's hearties bray at Philippe's shyer, play-acting smarties.
There's a good performance by Patrick Dewaere as the queer-baiting Marc, and Patrick Bauchitey's Philippe looks astonishingly li.ke Brian Howard at Oxford as he shows up at the Final Day ball ravishingly as a lady in red. Publicly selfexposed but inwardly fortified in his dress, Philippe courageously confronts his tormentor Marc by making an overtly homosexual overture to him. There's a false and bloody climax, and an unfortunate epilogue with Philippe and his faithful girlfriend, years later, buying an apartment together from Marc, now an ordinary defeated estate agent.
Claude Miller, the director, who has assisted a glittering string of French auteurs (Truffaut, Demy, Godard, etc), displays in his first picture almost too much confidence. In a way he's as put off by the ambiguities of his main characters as Schaffner is by Hemingway's problematical nature. His film affectionately, smoothly sweeps under the carpet of nostalgia feelings which I suspect are more complex and stubbornly resistant to catharsis than the rather neat way he ties it all up. Awkward contradictions abound: the two actors playing Marc and Philippe are much, too old for their parts, and the camp director, consistently lampooned, suddenly appears in one scene as an urbane and drolly tolerant fellow. Still, it's a lot tougher than Truffaut's current growing-up fantasy, L'Argent .de Poche.
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