CINEMA

formists like yourself decisively against it.

The 'state capitalists', similarly, have nothing but a kind souped-up reformism to offer Labour Party members who want really to fight for a change.

Having stayed inside the Party to the bitter end, during the entire right-wing witchhunt and expulsion of the Young Socialists, they are now out of the Party without a word of principled explanation as to how they got there.

The real debate today, claimed their leaflet for the meeting, was between those 'who still see the Labour Party as a possible agent of socialism... and those who believe that the time has come for the working class to discard such a party and throw up its own organizations' ' Revolutionaries,' John Palmer told the meeting, were simply 'reformists who mean it !' Hostile Like the Labour 'lefts', our middle-class 'state capitalists' live entirely on surface events —hostile to Marxism, unable and unwilling to understand or prepare organizationally and theoretically to meet the needs of the working class in its historic task.

The work of the Socialist Labour League through the Young Socialists, the All Trades Unions Alliance and the Workers' Press, is directed towards that force which pushed forward last Friday's split-the great movement of the working class on an international scale.

That this split took place is further confirmation that the conditions are maturing for a real fight against the right This will be taken forward, above all, through the fight for leadership in the trade unions -against the centrists. It is in this struggle that the Socialist Labour League will play a decisive role. THREE films from America this week, all made with that consumate professional confidence that characterizes the best of Hollywood, reflect an uncertainty, an insoluble sense of despair, a restlessness and incompleteness.

The first is 'Midnight Cowboy', directed by an Englishman, John Schlesinger, who made 'Billy Liar'. The first thing that is instantly apparent is the way in which he has responded to a different environment.

The film crackles with impressions of America that flash out from the screen with a strident commercial vulgarity.

The ear is assaulted by the incessant chatter of disc jockeys, the banalities of television programmes, the eye of the hurdy gurdy of neon adverts, the concrete expanses of highways, the threat of the endless rolling traffic. Amongst this nightmare men and women move with a kind of bewildered yet defensive isolation, indifferent through fear of each other.

Objectivity

In this Schlesinger has found a critical objectivity which has been lacking in his British films. The detail of casual meetings in buses, the overheard conversations, the random events of the streets build up a sharp mosaic of American life.

And into this enters Tex, brilliantly played by Jon Voight, a naive hustler from Texas who sets out to gigolo his way to fortune in New York.

Tex casts himself in the frontier-image of the cowboy, to play out the myth of virility and strength that carved out a continent, but the high boots and the stetson in metropolitan New York are the unsophisticated relic of the past, a joke to women, and only bait for the lonely guilt-ridden homosexuals who furtively walk the streets.

Innocence

Tex steers his ingenuous way through the network of neurotic and obsessive middle-class culture, where underneath the brittle sophistication lie loneliness and insecurity, aggression and desolation.

She, exquisitely played by Ali Margraw, has all the ar-