Film

Rip It Up, Issue 81, 1 April 1984, Page 34

Film

TO BE OR NOT TO BE Director: Alan Johnson The central problem of any Mel Brooks' film is that of integrating the wealth of gags and one-liners into the structure of the movie itself. In many cases Brooks has found some unity by building the film around the satire of a particular genre (western in Blazing Saddles. Hitchcockiana in High Anxiety)-, the latest takes this method a step further.

To Be Or Not To Be is a remake of Ernst Lubitsch's classic comedy of 1942 set in Occupied Poland with a troupe of Polish actors

trying to fend off and outwit their Nazi oppressors. The roles originally played by Jack Benny and Carole Lombard have been taken over by Brooks and the real life Mrs Brooks, Anne Bancroft. While To Be Or Not To Be benefits from a beautifully crafted script, there's also much to relish in the cast's seasoned performances. Brooks' outrageously broad acting style has its perfect foil in Bancroft's laconic delivery, Charles Durning blusters energetically as the credulous Nazi colonel and George Wyner's gay dresser is perfectly attuned to the sensibilities of our own Victor/Victorian age.

. From the opening scene, when Brooks and Bancroft shuffle and sing their way through "Sweet Georgia Brown" in Polish, To Be Or Not To Be has just the assurance to make it the comedy of 1984.

BRIMSTONE AND TREACLE Director: Richard Loncraine Dennis Potter's Brimstone and Treacle first appeared as a television play in 1976. Deemed too strong for British living rooms, it was duly banned and waited

another six years before it was remade as a theatrical film, as a vehicle of sorts for the rock singer Sting. A tale which revolves around a satanic visitor raping a paraplegic, brain-damaged girl is strong stuff, and Brimstone and Treacle is a black comedy in the tradition of Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr Sloane. However, Potter's idiosyncratic juggling of fantasy and reality, familiar to viewers of his Pennies from Heaven series, is quite different to Orton's more traditional, though bizzare, farces.

Brimstone and Treacle has its bizzare touches too, even in the more realistic moments

Denholm Elliott scrawling "In Memoriam" doggerel in the Victorian gloom of his London office, or the strange trio around the small electronic organ singing 'Bless This House'. Elliott and Joan Plowright are marvellously quirky as Sting's "victims" although Sting himself, playing an overly ingenuous* Beezlebub, is less convincing. Sting's soundtrack fits uneasily on Potter's grim morality tale Vivian Ellis' 30s number 'Spread a Little Happiness' sung over the closing credits would seem to indicate the direction a score could have taken. TERMS OF ENDEARMENT Director: fames Brooks Terms of Endearment picks up where Ordinary People left off a film about the average American family-next door calculated to wrench the very heart from the audience's collective bosom. The cynic might proffer that it's not every family which has a Renoir heirloom, or lives next door to an astronaut, but the advertising slogan is not one to be ignored as it beckons, "Come to laugh, come to cry, come to care, come to terms." Unfortunately, it is two films with which we have to come to terms. The first two-thirds of

Terms of Endearment bubbles along pleasantly enough as a wellobserved domestic comedy Brooks, the guiding light behind TV's Mary Tyler Moore Show has a nice eye for eloquence of the seemingly inconsequential. However, the injection of terminal cancer into the plot is a wrench of unsurmountable proportions. The film never quite recovers. Above all, it stands as a testament to Shirley MacLaine. Her performance as the dominating Aurora is a tour de > force, as impressive in its range as it is in its avoidance of the sentimental or the cliche. By comparison, Jack Nicholson's dipso-histrionics and Debra Winger's self-conscious mannerism left me cold. I suspect at least one of the three will walk away with an Oscar this month MacLaine deserves it. TRESPASSES Director: Peter Sharp What is good about Trespasses is very good indeed. One admires Leon Narbey's fine photography of the. New Zealand terrain, although once again the film itself almost gets upstaged by the photogenic setting. Emma Piper's performance as Katie Wells has an inner truth that we rarely see in local films every subtlety and nuance being highlighted by the relative crudity of some of the characterisation around her. The inclusion of a Centrepoint-style commune in the plot must have seemed a promising idea/ although, again, its potential is not fully realised in the final film.

On the other hand, Patrick McGoohan's characterisation of the father has its unconvincing moments, particularly in the last thirty minutes of the film and this is a serious flaw when he is the crux of the whole plot. And then there is the script itself, which chooses to relinquish character development in favour of some fairly laboured plotting the

deadly scenes with Terence Cooper and Don Selwyn in the local constabulary are too much in the shadow of Mortimer's Patch for their own good. Bernie Allen's tired score also sounds like a television left-over.

.Trespasses is a good example of the Hamlet complex that haunts New Zealand film-makers. They seem so often loath to pace their work with sufficient action. The one murder in Trespasses is staged with almost squeamish restraint. Perhaps the answer for our local industry is for someone to make an unflinching splatter movie. Imagine what George A. Romero (Dawn of the Dead, Creepshow) would have made of Strata ! If McGoohan had been allowed a few more victims in Trespasses, it could have been an altogether more lively affair. William Dart