LONDON LETTER
251
won first prize at the London Film Festival), and one British
(Reisz's
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,
from Alan Sillitoe's
novel-which was admired by every film critic in London except
me). I can see why
L'Avventura
won the prize and why
Shadows
ran for months at the Academy Cinema, since I thought them the
most exciting movies I've seen since
Hiroshima Mon Amour.
But
the welcome to
Saturday Night
can only be explained sociologically.
As cinema it was dull, talky and uninventive, but it did show, for
the first time in the English cinema, a working-class milieu that
was realistic (as against comic, sentimental or melodramatic) and
a working-class hero who accepted his status as normal, without
any ambition to "better himself" as, for instance, the hero of
Room
at the Top.
In a country whose class structure is still as massively
intact as England's is, despite all the recent chippings, this is a
real achievement. But to an American, remembering Farrell and
Dreiser, it is less sensational. In any case, social novelty has nothing
to
do with art. The big Midcult success has been Fellini's
La Dolce
Vita,
which was received by the critics more respectfully than it
should have been and which is now showing at two large first-run
houses simultaneously. In the manner of its kind, it combines a
serious theme with superficially advanced technique, but
L'Avven–
tura
conveys the corruption of upper-class Italian life better
in
a
short scene in the lobby of a luxury hotel than
Dolce Vita
does in
two complete orgies, perhaps because the former uses cinematic
devices while the latter relies on journalism.
The most that can be said for the theater season is that it is
better than New York's. I have seen Durrenmatt's
The Visit,
star–
ring the Lunts, Harold Pinter's
The Caretaker,
Waterhouse and
Hall's
Billy Liar,
and Zeffirelli's production at the Old Vic of
Romeo and Juliet. The Visit,
another Midcult success, was pre–
tentious and predictable; the Lunts have added no new items to the
bag
of tricks they unpacked thirty-five years ago and Mr. Durren–
matt is just another fellow-traveler on the express train of the New
Symbolism. So is Mr. Pinter, though a more talented one; he is
excellent when he is funny-many of his scenes echo those old
burlesque routines we had in pre-LaGuardia New York when the
straight man was maddened by the comic's fast-talking insistence on
