Television
Rare old bird
Clive Gammon
There seems to be a convention among television critics that one shouldn't ever notice old films. Well, certainly most of them aren't worth mentioning anyway but what was there last weekend to rival The Maltese Falcon on the box?
Not the Calcutta Cup from Twickenham, anyway, with its journeyman, knockabout stuff from two indifferent sides which even Bill McClaren couldn't talk into life. Not, so surfeited are we with wonders in BBC2's The World About Us, 'The Headless Valley,' latest in the series and featuring a wild ride aboard inflatables along the River Nahanni in British Columbia, though I shall long treasure the oddity of 'Amazing Grace' being thinly played on the pipes against a background of the Virginia Falls, said to be as high as Big Ben. Not, a thousand times not, Petula Clark singing Beatles songs almost as thinly, for The Sound of Petula, BBC1. (Whoever started the rumour that she is any different now from the Buttons-andBows singer she was a decade or so since?) Not even the delectable Penelope Wilton in the third of The Pearcross Girls plays, sister Anna this time and much obsessed with death.
And surely not the weekend's most ambitious offering, London Weekend's Achilles Heel, a play concerned, with the sufferings of a soccer hero on the skids (could we have heard of this theme before?). Why not, then? Lots of good contemporary stuff in it and the Georgie Best commotion is still in people's minds. Basically I think because David Irwin (" life is tough at the top when the pressures begin to build up" — TV Times), played by Martin Shaw, was a boring clod who, as far as I was concerned, could keep his ridiculous, selfimposed troubles to himself. I'm sure that Brian Clark, the playwright, intended this, thinking perhaps that the soccer theme of itself was enough to hold an audience.
If this were so, then he was quite wrong and not merely because big-time soccer is plainly proving less fascinating to the British people Saturday by Saturday. However contemporary the trappings, not even a Sunday-night telly play can hope to mean much with characters that are, at best, unsympathetic and so lacking in complexity that one begins to wonder if they aren't androids from some sub terranean store deep beneath London.
But my Bogart and my Greenstreet long ago, now there's a different matter altogether. Without much being said, BBC. 1 has been treating us Sunday after Sunday to some vintage stuff — rightly they call the series 'All Time Greats.' We've had Casablanca, Ace in,The Hole, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Double Indemnity pouring out of a rich cornucopia all in a few weeks, and now The Maltese Falcon. Maybe it's been on the box a few times before but it can't be repeated too often for me, which is more than I can say for Monty Python.
Bogart grinning like a mako shark; Barbara Stanwyck slinking down the stairs in Double Indemnity with the camera on the gold anklet (a boy I knew at school has spent his whole life working for General Accident as a result of seeing it — he even looks like Fred MacMurray now); Greenstreet off to Istanbul with Peter Lorre in tow to continue his seventeen-year-old search for the Maltese Falcon . . . a rich, heady brew. Perhaps they schedule plays like Achilles Heel for later in the evening just to make sure that we all sleep well.
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