The Buyers and Sellers

Price 5s CHRISTMAS might herald the arrival of pantomimes and ice spectaculars, but as far as films are concerned it's definitely scraping the bottom of the barrel.

West End cinemas are held down by long-running spectaculars like "The Battle of Britain' or 'Gone with the Wind', and when free will be replaced by equally long running spectaculars and when free ... etc.

It's a tough viewers.

There's 'John and Mary' to look forward to and the latest James Bond, but the only new film released this week was 'Magic Christian, starring Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr and directed by Joe McGrath.

In spite of the host of stars who make brief perfunctory appearances as walk-ons and bit parts, the film is distinguished by its sheer brutality.

What was a rather icy, cynical, but extremely funny book is transformed into a cynical and unfunny film.

Its basic premise is that everybody has a price and that anybody will do anything for money, and Sir Guy Grand, affably played by Peter Sellers, sets out to prove it.

A man with unlimited financial resources, he lays out thousands of pounds to hammer home the point.

His exploits include, among others, making a parking meter attendant eat the ticket, and bribing the Oxford crew to ram the Cambridge boat.

It is not part of a strategic CINEMA The Buyers and Sellers His more philistine escapades include paying Laurence Harvey to break out into a striptease during the "To be or not to be ... ' soliloquy in Hamlet, and buying a portrait of the school of Rembrandt for £30,000, then cutting out the nose with a pair of scissors.

This petty-bourgeois vulgarity is the real level of the film.

Guy Grand in the book is a malicious, old-style pioneer capitalist whose motivation is power, a contempt for people, his aim 'to make but atmo point is be removed from his class.

He is fixed firmly in that and the satire derives from it.

Peter Sellers is milk and water in comparison; an amiable squire, lovable eccentric, the hero of the piece, tilting expensively at some of the more obvious and least pressing windmills of our society.

But without a revolutionary content to its satire, it is trapped by precisely the reactionary system it attempts to lampoon.

For the allure allure in the fin the film that is glorified is power of money.

Grand is the hero, a sort of wealthy will-o-the-wisp, who can flit capriciously here and there, destroying pretension with the rustle of fivers.

There is no criticism, implicit or otherwise, of Grand as a character.

He is granted the divine right of wealth by the makers and is an ccho of the illusions that seem to fall out of the mouths of many self-made men and stars: I just want to buy my freedom'.

It is the freedom to manipulate others.

Even when Grand has had enough at the end of the film and decides to take a sleeping bag into the park-and this is no more motivated than anything else he does--presumably to find the simple life, he still has to bribe the park keeper.

The 'Magic Christian' absolutely illuminates not only the dead end of idealism, but its really reactionary content.

It can only conclude cynicism about a world that remains fundamentally unchangeable, where the future is decided by the ruling class, whatever its anarchistic or eccentric face.

Marxists have a totally different conception about human 'greed' and the future.

It is not a question of human nature that holds man back.

The fate of capitalism will not be decided by the whims of millionaires, but by the Evolutionary mobilization of the working class.

This has nothing to do magic or with Christ.

It is fought out and through the battle of Those who don't take up that struggle must find themselves in the reactionary camp, for there is no other direction for them to go.

Fascism's path is paved with 'liberal' good intentions and this film illustrates that road clearly.