Through a telescope

LAST rcello Mastrolanr showing arline LONDON PAYITION piccadilly cidos their hangers-on and stir well.

Serves to fill an idle hour.

Leo returns to inherit his mansion from the bosom of his family. He is, as befits a man in his position, 'alienated' (an inevitable result, in the modern cinema, of having private means and a university Alienated So alienated is he that he has to view the world through a telescope.

To start with it's mainly pigeons (Leo being ornithologically inclined) but when a pigeon he's watching is netted by a young Negro who releases it in a supermarket so that he and his girl can use the confusion to half-inch a frozen turkey, consumed with relish by all the family, Leo and his News. 4.12 Telephone game. 4.40 Origami. 4.55 London. 6.00 News. Lookaround. 6.35 Crossroads. 7.00 "The Gentle Gunman Robert Beatty Mills, Dirk Bogarde, and Elizabeth Sellars. It is 1941 and an IRA member supposed to leave a panics. 8.30 an London.ro 11.45 News, bomb in underground station, weather. social world. Mastroianni), in Probably to titillate the dilapidated critics, Boorman has spiced Notting Hill Gate. the scene with 'class' notions.

So poor Leo (who would otherwise be having an unequivocally fine time) gets hung up on 'social justice', the spiritual predicament of the rich and the vitality of the poor.

He sends the hungry family (anonymously) a trolley-load of supermarket food-but at the height of the binge (in which Leo and his telescope participate) the father succumbs to a heart attack.

He tries to rescue the daughter of the family from whoredom, is abused for his pains, and ends up leading "the masses' of his street (it ingly, the landlord to rescue transpires unknowhis house from his family, who, in the meantime, have had him centified.

But the pink politics of the ilm are so shallow they car almost be ignored.

(This is not to say that the critics were able to. Most of them never got away from the dilemma of the intellectual sympathizes untutored and unwashed. But thades the pro lotte rotten framework, there are some fine bits of observation.

The funeral for the father, with a passionate evangelical sermon, is one of the liveliest scenes in the film.

And when Leo's would-be wife takes him to a communal relaxing session for the uptight middle classes, naked and waist deep in a tepid swimming pool, splashing, touching, pro. SPICED WITH CLASS voking each other, swaying and moaning to the directions of the psychiatrist on the catwalk, you see the other side NOTIONS AND PINK of the coin.

Particularly expressive when the camera goes under water.

And they're not so ignorant as you might think. 'Is it the national crisis', says to him, 'or the world crisis? Just relax and tell me'.

But all the scenes are just incidents. IMPORTANT READING The film winds its colourful way through them-the cinema of the irrelevant.

I thought for one horrid moment (when the projector Fourth International failed for a few seconds) that I might have missed the whole point, the very keystone of the A JOURNAL OF INTERMATIOMAL MARXISM PUBLISHEO SY THE INTERNATIOMA: COMMITTEE OF THE FOURTH INTENNATIOMAL Volume 6 No 3 Price 5 Shillings Summer 1970 film. But an usherette gloomily reassured me on the way 1970 THE YEAR OFLENIN AND TROTSKY And I see her point: it's not a film anyone should watch 20 DOCUMENTS OF SOVIET But a sort of talent it cer- LENIN tainly has - magnified by the with-it colour and the tele- LUXEMBURG scopic lenswork. Like I said. it's a film about birds. Go see CLIEBKNECHT it if you like feathers - or droppings.

A DISAPPOINTING film is 'Serafino' by the Italian director Pietro Germi.

His earlier films, especially 'Il Posto' ('The Job'), were ERN IRECAND sensitive works, though made entirely from the standpoint of 'sympathy' with workers and their oppression.

In this latest one, made in colour and for CBS, he (literally) prostitutes his talent for catching dialect and gestures.

It's the escapades of a wenching peasant lad, with slap-stick added.

But it adds up to a vulgar caricature.

Only thing to be said in its favour is that its sharpest Available from New Park Publications 1186A Clapham High Sty London SWA. cracks are aimed at Mother

PAGE FOUR PRESS Tuesday, August