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PENELOPE GILLIATT
about dubbing and the states of film prints with the movie critics of
Sunday newspapers. Though he laughs exorbitantly at any Mack Sennett
silent, he is short on humor: Antonioni speaks to him like a blood–
brother. He detests the theatre, because it employs words, and he suspects
movies in which the dialogue is too good. The antique past of the drama
is
a constant reproach to him, and he therefore goes dutifully to silent
sessions at the tabernacle in the Museum of Modern Art or the National
Film Theatre in London, trying to manufacture an adequate retort to
Aeschylus, Shakespeare and Ibsen out of the films made between 1910
and 1929. This depth of feeling for movies without a sound track may
account for his indulgence towards sparsely subtitled works in unknown
languages: the concentration on the images that incomprehension allows
takes him back to the halcyon days before the talkies. His Socialism does
not prevent him from making the most rigid distinction between "good"
art and "popular" art, for even an observer as purblind as he is cannot
help noticing that the films he really admires never get
a
commercial
release. But the fact that the cinema is a mass form weighs heavily on his
Left conscience, and he therefore develops a loyal atoning taste for
tenth-rate Westerns and mechanical gangster movies, feeling that they
are a pipeline to the people. Elvis Presley interests him on ideological
grounds, and he may go miles to see
Hercules Unchained.
Thus the real
madman can even create art-cinema out of movies that were never
meant to be anything but money-spinning celluloid: he is not as de–
pendent as one might think on works made on 16mm. or in Swedish.
British comedies, for instance, have lately become a cultists' stamping–
ground in the United States, and the in-group has unerringly picked out
the worst of this modest breed for its admiration. Hamminess is re–
spected as a pop virtue, and so is any stock character who makes stock
jokes in a language that is suspected to be somebody's vernacular : this
may induce an earnest reference to the
commedia dell'arte.
An amiable
piece of trumpery called
Carryon Nurse,
an unpretentious popular
comedy that is stiff with dead gags, played twenty-five weeks to art
cinema audiences in Los Angeles. From where a Briton sits, the phoney–
intellectual success of potboilers like this is as rich a fact as an outbreak
of textual criticism about the literature on the back of cereal packages.
So is the assumption that the bland jokes made by the Boulting Brothers
have anything to do with satire. True satire hurts, and the satirist has
to expose himself; but when a Tory colonel goes to see
Private's Progress,
their lampoon of Army pomp, he merely chuckles appreciatively and
says that they must be amusing fellers.
A critic on a popular paper in England told me recently that all great
