WEDNESDAY TV

7.10 8.50 9.10 11.00 11.35 BBC 1 Laugh Parade : "Merry Andrew'.

With Danny Kaye. A timid schoolmaster becomes involved with a travelling circus.

Main News and Weather. Wednesday Play: 'Mille Miglia'.

Play about Stirling Moss. International Football :

England v. Holland.

Weather.

REGIONAL BB All regions as BBC-1 except following times:

Midlands and East Anglia: 6.00-6.45 p.m. Midlands Today 11.37 News, Weather, Nationwide.

Weather.

North of England: 6.00-6.45 p.e: 11.37 News, Weather.

Wales: 6.00-6.45 p.m. Wales Today, Weather, Nationwide. 6.45-7.10 Heddiw.

REGIONAL ITV 11.00-11.20 a.m. Play School. 7.05 Square Two. 7.30 News and Weather. 8.00 Man Alive:

1l Plus, part 1: The Way.

Solo:

Jeremy Brett as a portrait. 6.03 6.30 7.00 7.30 8.00 9.00 10.00 10.30 11.00 11.45 10.30 10.55 11.00 11.00 a.m.-3.00 p.m. School s. 4.17 Tingha and Tucker. 4.30 Crossroads. 4.55 Lift Off. 5.20 gauntlet. 5.50 News.

Today.

The Ghost and Mrs This Is Your Life.

Coronation Street.

The Champions.

Kate.

News At Ten.

Lonnie.

With Lulu Antony.

Professional Wres tling.

What The Papers Say. 12 midnight The Days Your Life.

Scotland: 2.30-2.50 p.m. Modern Studies. 6.00-6.45 Reporting Scotland.

10.15-11.00 Sportsreel. 11.37 News, Weather.

Northern Ireland: 6.00-6.45 p.m. Scene Around Six, Weather, Nationwide.

11.37 News, Weather.

South and West: 6.00-6.45 p.m. Points West, South Today, Spotlight SouthWest, Weather, Nationwide. 11.37 News, Weather.

Show Of The Week The Morecambe and Wise Show.

Europa:

Woman's Place il My World • And come To It.

News, Weather. the doctor's receptionist put him back in contact with his working-class origins.

He begins to feel that his life in London, his job, the society he now moves in has reduced him to nothing more than an actor, someone unreal.

On returning to London he can't stand his wife's upperclass indifference, her social cool, so he gets drunk, breaks up a party she is giving and slugs a member of the firm.

For this he is suspended from work and his wife walks out on him.

From Liverpool it is confirmed that the police aren't interested in the old man's death and it is clear that Marler must avenge it.

He returns for the funeral, and, providing himself with an alibi, kills the murderer who turns out to be a frightened boy in a • leather jacket.

He then buries his father, says goodbye to his aunts and mother, and leaves.

He wonders whether to contact the receptionist, but he sees her in the street with her kid, the drab council flats behind her, and drives on.

Is it, this that determines him? Is it the death on his hands? It isn't clear, but he comes back to London full of fight to retain his job.

He takes his boss's secretary to bed, finds out the 'dirt' on him and promptly goes to the managing director the next day with a file full. Tire or ol Reckoning'.

He is promoted to his now ex-boss's position and his wife comes back to him.

Driving home with her, he shoots the red light of a road works signal. He hurtles along the one-way traffic line with a lorry approaching head-on. Miraculously he gets out of it.

As he says: 'If I can get out of that, I can get out of anything' By his actions, his opportunism, his ruthlessness, his ambition within the capitalist system, he stands condemned, and this is finally the judgement that the film would have us opt for.

But there is equally an ambiguity about this. His role is fixed within the context of hero; his energy, fast cars, etc.

add up to a certain glamourization.

As played by Nicol showing at the Plaza cinema, Piccadilly.

son, he is a compelling and irresistible character.

A. further confusion is that all coherent criticism of capitalism, its exploitation and oppression of workers, comes from Marler's mouth.

At his wife's party he savagely denounces the fraudulence of their parasitism, and the audience identifies and sympathizes with him.

Similarly the crisis that he goes through in Liverpool when he feels his own fraudulence we are meant to warm to.

I'm not suggesting that characters are without their ambiguities and complexities, or that such contradictions cannot be contained within one person, but at the same time they must be placed by the film-maker.

In a way there is a random exploitation of Marler; at one moment he is the mouthpiece of the film, then at another sympathy is yanked away from him and he stands condemned.

We get the impression that his 'left' outpourings directly connect with and flow into his final ruthless stance.

For sure, the history of the labour movement is richly studded with left postures that become right-wing opportunism, but it is the responsibility of the maker to analyze and place this.

If his left outburst is merely a sentimental ranting, which it would seem to me to be, then it must be evaluated as such.

We don't get this because there is an overall lack of a coherent conception of the subject matter.

A similar confusion is reflected in the attitudes towards the working - class characters in the film.

They are presented in a totally sentimental way.

We are given the by now cliché image of the late 1960s of working-class life-the club, where it's all knees-ups, punch-ups and bingo.

At home it's the muted round of tea and tears.

In this way the film on simplified stereotypes and not on the rich variation of life itself.

The Irish emigré community in Liverpool is a special social community, but UnIS wasn't really explored.

Instead we had a sentimentalized view of backwardness, and the line between sentimentality and patronage is a very narrow one.

What we have is a romanticized middle-class viewpoint.

Nowhere is this more striking than in the characterization of the doctor's receptionist played by Rachel Roberts.

She preposterous character, a literary invention, in her dialogue and her posture, a sort of symbol of a working-class emancipation. She is direct, earthy, sensua She has 'commor vulgar touch that hires the imagination of Marler.

It with her he realizes his life is an act. She 'the most real thing I've met in years'.

And it's here I think that is the key to the fundamental weakness and source of the film.

The polarization of classes is seen in terms of what is more 'real'. The working class "real'. would follow that the middle class are 'unreal'.

Working-class experience is more 'valid'.

Submission

Here we have implied a total idealization of the class, which, in political terms, means an adaptation submission to its backwardness.

But the class struggle is not realities of life stere, buts ser the daily conflict which the primary contradiction capitalism creates.

The fight is for the consciousness and leadership of class for revolutionary ends. This means a conscious against backwardness.

It is precisely at this point that Marxism breaks sharply with idealism.

"The Reckoning' has all the tensions of confusion Characteristic of a lot of the work of the 1960s.

It is someone trying to grapple with something that at that point they can't resolve.

This accounts for the creative patchiness of the film, the lapses in concentration, and that indecisiveness which produses confusion.

At difficult moments tends towards oversimplification, as though the shutters have been brought down over too-difficult questions.

It contrasts quite starkly with 'Comrade Jacob'-a later work of John McGrath-which is much more resolved, confident and coherent.

PAGE POUR WORKERS' PRESS January 14, 1970