CINEMA
Creme de la creme
PENELOPE IIOUSTON
The Runaway (Academy Three. `C1') Since her first appearance, occupying a large part of an issue of the New Yorker back in 1961, Miss Jean Brodie seems to have been advancing at quite a fair clip towards myth status. Part of her insidious attraction, perhaps, is that she's effectively a myth to begin with: the eternal elusive and infuriating schoolenis- tress, half-comical at all times and especially to tier own Brodie set, subject of endless, ludic- rous, ritualistic speculation, fixed in the minds of her pupils in some Brodie dream-world re- mote from natural law, and quite possibly, in her nerve-racking way, the best teacher in the school. 'Who is the greatest Italian painter?' 'Leonardo da Vinci, Miss Brodie.' That is in- correct. The answer is Giotto; he is my favour- ite.' A little lunacy in a teacher may go a lqpg way, but it's the slightly mad and their dicta that one actually remembers.
The essence of Muriel Spark's brilliantly eva- sive novel is that it is remembering Miss Brodie: the time shifts are vital to the lace-work struc- ture, the mesh of recollection through which Brodie (one would never call her Jean) looms as a presence rather than a person. I didn't see the play, but the film script is by the same writer, Jay Presson Allen, and on its evidence she put in a good deal of careful carpentry. Here, on the screen, is still a serviceable three-acter, with its neatly spaced out big scenes. But Miss Spark's Jean Brodie never had a big scene, ex- cept in her mind; at least it wasn't in her nature to be caught railing like a fishwife at her head- mistress, or sending cries of `Assassin!' ringing down the school corridors after Sandy, her be- trayer. Ronald Neame compounds the error by directing these quarrels in screaming close-up, when reason insists that the camera should re- tire to a neutral corner and keep speculatively cool. On the screen, the stage's instinct to com- press and clarify could have been resisted, and the spectacular elegance of the book's structure restored. Not, however, in this film.
Still, there's always the unnerving precision of the dialogue: Miss Brodie's tribute to chrysan- themums as `such serviceable flowers' (not in the book, but nearly), her views on open win- dows (Six inches is perfectly adequate. More is vulgar') and on the immunity of such as Cleo- patra from the evils of team spirit. Maggie Smith, clinging not entirely confidently to the Edinburgh accent, with all its cadences for lay- ing down the law, gives a performance which is probably about as good as the film allows. She has the precise measure of Brodie as an articu- late absurdity, but whenever she's pushed to- wards stridency the performance noticeably wavers. Pamela Franklin plays, very well, the alamingly perspicacious Sandy; but again the resonance of the novel is missing. One per- formance, though, gives off a marvellous quiet, phosphorescent glitter: Celia Johnson as Miss Mackay, the very rational headmistress whose distrust of Miss Brodie goes almost too deep for words. It is a performance of tiny, appalled tremors and bone-dry diction; beautifully dis- ciplined comedy, expressing a true head- mistress's permanent, pessimistic conviction that whatever anyone is up to, it will be found to be no good.
The heroine of Pretty Poison has clearly never been exposed to education by the likes of Miss Brodie. She is the buoyant, limpid American teenager, cheer-leader, Pepsi-Cola drinker, enthusiast for the CIA, in her blandest Lolita dress; and one object of this agreeably subversive comedy-thriller is to knock some chips off this particular fragment of the American dream. Anthony Perkins plays a young man (in the context, perhaps rather too old a young man) who has pettishly burnt down his aunt's house while she happened to be in- side, and is now whiling away the time by spin- ning fantasies of his own life as a secret agent. He draws in the girl (Tuesday Weld), only to find that he has hooked a small, milk-fed Lizzie Borden, who leaps at the chance the fantasy offers to dispose of any obstacles, her mother included. '
Noel Black, a new director for features, can't entirely control this tricky bit of explosive; and perhaps hasn't helped himself by some of the pictorial doodling which Hollywood film- makers seem to be using in the hope that their movies will come out looking French. But Pretty Poison is good enough to survive a few tactical errors: crisp and often hilarious on the surface, it insidiously winds itself into darker territory, where mother comes tripping upstairs with the breakfast tray to get three bullets ripped across her blouse. Anthony Perkins, faced with the final reality of the corpse in the car, deals very well with the blank shock (an impish echo of Psycho) of finding that he can't dispose of it. And there's a devastating performance by Tuesday Weld as the chubby, implacable little monster who can't be late back to school be- cause 'we've got the honour system.'
Tapan Sinha's The Runaway is a fetch- ingly - simple story about an Indian boy who • keeps running off. to join the acro- bats, or the travelling theatre troupe, or— in the film's longest episode—to take up resi- dence with a rich and genial couple who give him English lessons and resignedly hope that he. might keep their cantankerous daughter quiet. The world is Tagore's by way of Satyajit Ray : barges on the river, the da271ing white Indian palazzo with cannon in the garden, the simpering tutor reading Thomas Campbell to his pupils, and the marvellously managing little village girl of ten or so, making the most of her superior status as a child widow. Tapan Sinha has had the sense to kee-, it light and simple: he isn't another Ray, and probably knows it, and in particular he never approaches Ray's extraordinary ability to communicate just what an incident means to his characters. Without tIlat sense of importance, the audience is bound to .find itself, however unwillingly, a little patronising.
And then, when one is beginning to feel like this, charm takes over: the boy comes upon the great barge, with its rich owners on their drawing-room deck, the cross little daugh- ter stumping about, and the servants off on shore peeling vegetables for dinner. From this point, the feeling the film harnesses is childlike and exhilarating: we simply Want to be on that river, or stalking those cool corridors among the stuffed tigers.
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