CINEMA
Middle-aged Spread
What's New, Pussycat? (Odeon, Leicester Square, 'X' certificate.)—Nine Days of One Year. (Academy Cinema Club.)
WERE I national dictator of taste in the cinema (which heaven forbid), on the grounds of tastelessness I would forbid the following to anyone over twenty (by which I mean the look of twenty, whatever the historical figures):
(a) dancing of the sort you might vaguely label `bacchante-style,' which includes shooting arms into the air like pistons, crumpling on the floor like exhausted paper bags, and peeling off clothes in a frenzy;
(b) love scenes under the shower, especially wear- ing plastic bathcaps; (c) bikinis, especially on enormous women, how- ever shapely;
(d) cute dialogue, however indescribable;
(e) boyishness and/or girlishness, especially when directed at the audience.
All these, which turn up with distressing regu- larity of Clive Donner's What's New, Pussycat?, would probably be perfectly acceptable if every- one involved was, or looked, between ten and twenty years younger. As it is, it is rather like watching the fairies of A Midsummer Night's Dream played by the Arsenal. But as I exclude Paula Prentiss and Capuchine, both, I imagine, well over the age-limit, frcm my strictures and shudders (the one as an intellectual stripper of marvellous exuberance and suicideability, the other as glacial and gorgeous as ever, both hugely funny), presumably personality, rather than physique, is what mostly counts.
As something of a Donner fan I went in high hopes, liking the title, the credits, and the funny first minutes. Then everything collapsed, Mr. Donner resigned from directing and simply flung everything, ancient and modern. good and bad, wild and woolly, into his film and then rode his bicycle over it. All that is left to admire is the tyre-tracks, and a pretty smudgy lot they are.
There's no plot, but who cares? Better films have been made out of less. What matters is there's no shape, no control, little wit and an incurably middle-aged spread in what ought to be trim and teenage. Worst villains or perhaps victims of the piece are Peter O'Toole and Romy Schneider as a couple on the brink of marriage, behaving with such dreadful archness (she in particular) that the whole screen winces. Then there's Peter Sellers as a lecherous psychiatrist in a wig like 'Richard HI and vaguely matching velvet suits, and he, of course. is never less than excruciatingly skilful: but everything about him (so concentrated is his method) is said in the first five minutes, so that all the rest is simply saying it over again. In fact, his performance is much like the whole film, which squeezes all its fun and inventiveness into the first twenty minutes or so, and then goes threshing about after laughs with the finesse of a hippo.
Nine Days of One Year (director: Mikhail Romm) is a quiet surprise from Russia, so quiet it scarcely seems surprising till you start to blink at the (much better than usual) subtitles, yet so
Russian you are almost expecting (as always happens with the Russians) at least an emotional surprise. It is about scientists in Russia, and in particular three physicists, a girl and two men, and the way their work and private lives are tangled and interdependent, as happens to anyone who cares about work. Despairing of the one she loves, who seems too busy to bother with her, the girl decides to marry the other; but when they go out together, meaning to break the news, it is the first man she decides to marry, after all, though he seems reluctant, sick, and preoccupied. Then, in a cliché-story, things would have all settled down, marriage would have cured their troubles; but here it doesn't. The marriage doesn't so much go wrong as simply silt up, nothing happens, life stagnates; but the work goes on.
What is pleasing and satisfactory is the film's total lack of what one has come to think of as Russian cinematic cliches, visual and emotional. These are people before they are scientists or Russians; science, though they live and breathe it, is nothing to wave flags about. No one makes speeches, no one strikes attitudes, there is humour of a gentle yet sharpish sort, the sort implicit in character rather than explicit in jokes, never once do the trumpets sound offscreen or the heavenly choirs strike up. In fact, it is an adult film, out- spoken about the sort of things worth speaking out about, where so many Russian films have seemed childish and muzzled. The two men, being anything but hidebound heroes, help enormously; they are Alexei Batalov, who was the man in The Lady with the Little Dog, and, very burly and bourgeois, the unforgettable film Hamlet, Innokenti Smoktunovsky.
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