- Cinema
Rare device
Kenneth Robinson
The funniest event of the film-going year was the premiere of The Towering Inferno. Before the picture began, showing us the latest technique for apparently setting fire to actors, the Ipswich Fire Brigade Band went on the stage and played Gems from the Classics. This was not only funny, but also symbolic. Violence in the cinema is now often tempered by comedy. Equally important, audiences are ready to laugh and cheer at the most solemn moments. Advance notices from America warned us that the hero of Death Wish, a man who set out to kill as many muggers as possible, and been 'cheered in a disturbing way" by film-goers. To me it seemed the cheers came simply because the deaths were quick, clean and unconvincing. City violence is, in fact, as stylised today as the old Cowboys-and-Indians stuff. I believe the moments of horror are now laughed at because cinema corpses mean as little as a fat opera singer falling from the battlements in Tosca.
This has something to do with the images on the wide screen becoming more important than words. When fire-bugs brought flames to people's ears, hair or eyeballs in Bugs, audiences were enchanted. It was the same in Flesh Gordon, which gave us the first nude on fire. Or Pelham 1-2-3, where the hi-jacker of a subway train placed a foot on the live rail and produced smoke from the ears.
With the decline of words (to near-incoherence in California Split, and to near-silence in the marvellous Badlands) the enormous pictures of today seem to have acquired something of the qualities of the silent cinema. Music is becoming as obviously prominent as it was in the silent days. It was employed to underline .
innocence and nostalgia in At Long Last Love; eighteenth-century conceptions of beauty in Barry Lyndon, and irresponsibility in this week's release, Lucky Lady. This film goes further than any production I can remember in using a sound-track which is directly opposed, in its mood, to what we are seeing. A crazy, violent gun-battle at sea is accompanied by Zez-Confrey-style piano novelties of the 'thirties. And this proves something I have always suspected. That if, for instance, you played The Teddy Bear's Picnic' while screening a horror picture, the horror would disappear.
The past year in the cinema has been one of great originality and audacity. I shall not forget the playing of Bach fugues in Rollerball. Or the occasional use of a new gimmick, notably in The Eiger Sanction. Tiny distant figures are dwarfed by magnificent scenery as they throw banal phrases to each other in super-loud stereo.
Nor shall I forget the way Robert Altman took the glamour out of show business in Nashville and yet made the film stunning to look at and listen to. Or the flash-forwards (as a change from flash-backs) in Alan Resnais' Stavisky, telling us about death and tragedy to come. It was just as if we had been thrown bits of a jig-saw that told us too much of the completed picture too soon.
Even that unmemorable film, Shampoo, had one unforgettable scene. A crowd of drunken citizens were grouped round an election-night television programme. This made a devastating comment. The politicians' pronouncements sounded even more stupid than usual, when heard among party-goers who were drunkenly disregarding them. And the party-goers looked especially silly, next to television pictures of impending disasters in their country's leadership.
really cannot select the year's best films in order of importance. I can merely say how glad I am to have been stimulated by so many pictures in 1975. The cinema is rarely boring. It is sometimes infuriating. As When the pur veyors of Denmark's Danish Pillow Talk described it as innocent fun and games, when it was in fact, unabashed fornication and showed an incredible lapse by the censor. Just as infuriating was the failure of Aken field, which ought to have worked. But the film did prompt me to read, for the first time, the much richer original by Ronald Blythe.
The cinema is so generous with ideas that even if a film doesn't quite succeed it always has something to offer. The Wilby Conspiracy was not the brightest of thrillers, but it said a lot about the need for white people in South. Africa to be liberated just as much as the blacks. The Panic in Needle Park presented the world of junkies in a way that could, I supposed, have attracted drop-outs. But it also showed, with compassion, how easily a layabout can become a real accident of society. I could go on with thelist — The delightful reconstruction of New York's Little Italy in Godfather II. The unusual literate qualities of The Romantic Gentlewoman. The wonderfully vulgar images and sheer effrontery of Ken Russell's truly terrible Lisztomania. The ludicrous rubber sharks of Jaws. . .
In Graham Greene's preface to his collected film criticisms from The Spectator he wrote: '1, sometimes long for the dead 'thirties, for Cecil
B. de Mille and his crusaders, for the days when almost anything was likely to happen.'
I myself look forward to another year in which almost anything can still happen. The cinema has become, more than ever before, a sunny pleasure drome. It is 'a miracle,' as Graham Greene quoted, 'of rare device.'
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