"A Bout de Souffle": Film That Holds the Imagination FROM OUR FILM CRITIC TIomorrow A Bout de Souffle. directed by M. Jean-Luc Godard and with M. Francois Truffaut responsible for the screenplay, opens at the Academy Cinema. It is in the fashion- able idiom. a nouvelle vague film, a pro- duction of the Cahiers dui Cinema group. In the words of an article in the current issue of Sight and Sounld. it is the group's "intellectual manifesto ". In that it preaches the doctrine of social and moral disengagement, this may well be so. It is a film in the veins of which runs not the healthy, turbulent blood of anarchy but the thin. grey fluid of nihilisnm. Yet it would be a mistake to treat A Bout de Souffle entirely in terms of intel- lectual generalizations or to think of it as something new and revolutionary. There are moments when it follows the classic lines (classic as the cinema understands the term, that is) of Le Jour se LUve. only in the place of the forces of conscience and retribuuLon that were there at work, here there is only futility, the sense of waste. loss. purposelessness. in that last word lies, perhaps, the clue to what it is in the film that attracts and holds the imagination. It is not moral purposelessness that is here the issue. but neither those random acts and words which form the patternless pattern of everyday human existence. Script-writer and director are determined to break out of the all too predictable formula which enzloses in the embrace of death the aver- age big-scale commercial film from its opening to its closing sequence, and it is this determination whicb gives A Bout de Souffle its stature as a serious film. Michel (M. Jean-Paul Belmondo), a thief, the would-be anarchist who is yet the nihilist, the negation and denial of life. is driving a stolen car to Paris when he is stopped by a policeman. He shoots him dead, gets to Paris and there divides his time between stealing, dodging the police net that is closing round him and trying to persuade Patricia (Mlle. Jean Seberg). a young American girl, to run away with him to Rome. The scenes which show Michel and Patricia together form the substance of the film and make it alive and creative, even if all it creates are moods, moods which pass. which are in- consistent, which bear no relationship to one another. Patricia at one point would seem to yearn for a tenderness Michel is incapable of giving her, but there is no conclusion, as there is in life often no con- clusion, to their jerky, inconsequent argu- ments. Physical passion gives way to boredom. and then there are sudden releases into puppyish play. while ques- tions go unanswered and forgotten and all the time the camera is observing and, by the subtlety of its observations. interpret- ing. M. Belmondo has the easier part; Mlle. Seberg gathers strength from the challenge with which the character of Patricia presents her. Included in this programme is a short documentary film, Let My People Go. which gives a picture of apartheid in practice. PARRISH Written, produced and directed by Mr. Delmer Daves." It is always good to see one band and mind in control of a film, and so Parrish. now showing at the Warner Cinema, starts with prejudice in its favour. Unfortunately, Parrish soon proves to be a film doomed to disappoint even the most modest of expectations. Many have been the Hollywood "sagas "-and seldom has a word needed inverted commas more- that have centred in the rivalries of wheat and cattle barons. here the commoditv out of which empires are carved is tobacco. Judd Raike (Mr. Karl Malden) is the reigning tobacco monarch, and, since his unpleasing sons indulge in a kind of droit de seigneur. the name is only too appro- priate. Judd marries Ellen (Miss Claudette Colbert), who has come to Connecticut to chaperone Alison (Miss Diane McBain), the difficult daughter of a minor tobacco sovereign, Post (Mr. Dean Jagger). Ellen has a son, Parrish (Mr. Troy Donahue), and as the title suggests. it is round him that the film is built. The girls come at Parrish thick and fast and he has also the responsi- bilitN of looking after his mother and of coping with dialogue that knocks down and defeats member after member of the cast as they take their places on the tobacco field. Mr. Donahue gives a painstaking impression of tousle-haired independence, the tousled hair being a carefully con- trived effect. while the liln as a whole succeeds in the improbable task ot making Miss Colbert look almost ridiculous. "A Bout de Souffle": Film That Holds the Imagination