Demolition Derby

By J.C.

LOOT

Directed by SILVIO NARIZZANO Screenplay by RAY GALTON and ALAN SIMPSON

The point of the late Joe Orton's play Loot--not the only point, but a prominent one--was outrageous and exhilarating bad taste. Director Silvio Narizzano, no stranger to bad taste himself (Georgy Girl, Blue), changes Orton's cyanide cocktail into a fey demolition derby.

Loot looks like an unlikely hybrid of the Marx Brothers, Agatha Christie and a training film for the Mattachine Society. Narizzano has directed the bad taste in bad taste, clumsily camping it up at every opportunity, blunting Orton's coruscating wit. That this comes through at all is owing less to Narizzano than to the play's admirable resiliency.

The plot, which defies both description and belief, is a charade on the general subject of greed, its manifestations, problems and eventual rewards. Two delirious lads (Hywel Bennett and Roy Holder), keen on money and each other, develop a plot to blow up a bank safe and stash the take in Mrs. McLeavy's coffin. Mrs. McLeavy is the recently departed mother of one of the boys. Mr. McLeavy (Milo O'Shea) has a lickerish eye on Fay the nurse (Lee Remick), whose charms are available at an ever accelerating price. Investigating them all is a detective called Truscott (Richard Attenborough), who fancies he is fooling everyone by disguising himself as a member of the water board. At the denouement, just deserts are enjoyed by all.

Logic is lampooned, insanity triumphant in Orton's language, which is preserved here in reasonable facsimile. Miss Remick, dolled up to look like a prize in a shooting gallery, is calculating and amusing. Attenborough and O'Shea are nothing short of hilarious. With puffy face and popping raisin eyes, Attenborough looks like a hot cross bun impaled on a rag mop as he continually cross-examines the befuddled O'Shea. During an interval in the questioning, Attenborough boasts that it was he who solved the notorious riddle of "the limbless girl killer." "Who'd want to kill a limbless girl?" asks O'Shea sympathetically. "Oh, she wasn't the victim," Attenborough replies. "She was the killer." Not even Narizzano can curdle an exchange like that. J.C.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.