Films by Freda Bruce Lockhart

More honours for Bond
TRADITIONALLY at New Year, film critics trot out their lists of the Old Year's ten or twelve best films. For 1983 we had two shots, one at our own selection one to cast our vote for the award of the Film Section of the Critics' Circle.
Last year I recall that my own choice largely agreed with that of the majority of my colleagues. This year has been slightly different. On the last night of the London Film Festival when the awards were to be announced, the Film Section of the Critics' Circle received a short-list, arrived at the first rounds of voting in the various categories. These were: best film, best screenwriter, best English language film, best foreign language film, etc. and two Special Awards, one technical/one non-technical.
I was disconcerted to find that of the five films short-listed in each main category, I should have been happy to support any one of four, but in neither case the fifth or final winner: respectively Scorsese's King of Comedy for best film, and the Turkish Yo/ as best foreign language film.
No system of awards satisfies everybody as just. The most prestigious screen awards are those of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Oscars. Even Oscars could learn at least one thing from the Critics' Circle awards. Year after year people are infuriated by seeing the film which is voted best film getting all the other Oscars as well: best director, best design and the rest. That is not necessarily unjust but it is intolerably tedious.
The Critics' Circle evaded this particular irritation by ruling that no one film be given more than one award.
The ensuing shuffle ensures that almost all the deserving artists get some award, though not necessarily in the aptest category. It was eminently satisfactory for example that the gifted Ruth Prawer Jhabvala get a "bcst screenwriter" award whether or not hers was the aspect of the splendid Heat and Du.st most deserving of honour. Similarly, Andrzej Wajda clearly merits a best director award, though whether Danton was his most deserving of the honour might be questioned.
Of the two Special Awards, the technical one went unanimously I believe, and properly to Ben Kingsley's marvellous performance as Gandhi; the non-technical one interestingly to a newish film distribution company, Artificial Eye for the "quality of its releases, a welcome pat on the
back for enlightened distributors.
To end with my own choice: ins majoi film csocricticc ot the year was the London Film Festival's "Tribute to I.illian Gish", a two-part experience, consisting as it did of Kevin Brownlow and David Gill's two great Thames Television silents, Broken Blossoms the old Griffith-Gish classic which also gave Richard Barthelmess a never-to-be repeated glimpse of greatness and the less widely known The Wind, directed by Victor Seastrom. Never having seen The Wind before, I was bowled over by one of the few films that have ever really and legitimately frightened me.
The Gish acting double was a revelation, one we hope to see extended this year if the octogenarian star's latest picture Hambone and Hillie is released as promised.
Next on my list would be An
Englishman Abroad, Schlesinger's brilliant movie of
Coral liro■% N1osem%
encounter with the traitor Burgess (Alan Bates). My first instinct was to name as best film Mao to Mozart the fascinating Anglo-Chinese non-pop musical starring Isaac Stern the violinist and the Peking Conservatoire nas'Iso.1 with “Itillgliiottigs students. It may not be what most people consider a "best movie", but it was certainly the most original and enjoyable to me.
'lo bring my list up to ten — counting the Gish tribute as one — I'll throw in Local Hero, Heat and Dust, The Leopard, Fanny and Alexander, Bresson's L'Argent, We of the Never Never, The Year of Living Dangerously.
And of course for eleventh there was James Bond. Twice over this year: we had Roger More in Octopussy, a smart and dashing adventure of the bright young Bond; then at the end of the year was Sean Connery's great comeback as an adult Bond with solemn nuclear preoccupations, a new "M" (Edward Fox) and Moneypenny (Pamela Salem) and the same if another lot of girls giving him therapy in an official health farm. One of them lures him to what looks very like an underwater encounter with It"'. Never Again is Hot as uproarious as some earlier Bonds. But I rather liked its gravity and solemn pace. Nor am I sure I go all the way with Connery's biographer, Andrew Rissik, to recognise him as positively a great actor. But he is certainly a considerable star and movie actor. Nor is there any doubt of his welcome back. The great public in case anybody had jumped to the conclusion that there no longer was a film public — is enraptured by his return as Bond. They are saying welcome with their feet in queues all over London for Never Say Never Again.
"PG" Diverse Classics and ABC's Brainstorm ("Empire") is as upsetting as its title, though not exactly in the way suggested. The technology of a story all told apparently in the tapes which record people's emotions, their "senses of sight, sound, touch and smell" and the invention which monitors and transmits brain emotions and feelings" is quite simply beyond me. But the sound and fury of the goodies and the baddies squabbling for possession of the relevant tapes is only too familiar. A point of slightly morbid interest in the cast is that this was pretty Natalie Wood's last film before she was found drowned. Also in the cast is Louise Fletcher, memorable as the nurse in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.