Out of Control

By J.C.

TEN DAYS' WONDER

Directed by CLAUDE CHABROL

Screenplay by PAUL GARDNER and EUGENE ARCHER

"This wonder, as wonders last, lasted nine days," intones Orson Welles in his best Eastern Airlines Wings-of-Man voice. The image cuts abruptly from a black screen to Tony Perkins thrashing and twitching in bed. He is in the last throes, we learn later, of an uncongenial drug experience. His hands are drenched in blood--"my blood," Perkins sobs, although he does not seem to have even a minor contusion.

Claude Chabrol, who excels at tightly disciplined exercises in suspense (This Man Must Die, Le Boucher), seems himself to be going momentarily delirious in Ten Days' Wonder, where tension and insight are subordinated to sorry stylistic flamboyance. Chabrol's camera swoops about like a dizzy flamingo, descending from great altitudes to light on such still lifes as a garden, a pond or two naked lovers entwined in the green leaves.

The lovers are Charles and Helene (Perkins and Marlene Jobert), the adopted children of a dotty millionaire tyrant named Theo Van Horn (Welles). Papa has used his fortune to re-create meticulously the year 1925. "It was an exciting time to be alive," he explains over his nightly gourmet repast, glaring balefully around the table at anyone who might offer a contradiction. Charles has to romp about the estate in knickers, but takes some solace in sculpting huge, brooding Olympian figures. Helene is something of a stiff, a quality convincingly conveyed by Miss Jobert, who shuffles through the film in a state of saucer-eyed rigor mortis.

Also on hand is an intellectual friend of Charles called Paul Regis (Michel Piccoli), who lacks the brains to get out while the going is good. Charles and Helene confess their passion to him, and Regis receives the news with equanimity. He even helps the lovers deal with a blackmailer and generally tries to ease a situation further complicated by the fact that Helene is also Papa's wife. It all leads to murder, which is only to be expected from a film that is adapted from an Ellery Queen novel.

There is also a great deal of cosmic chatter about guilt, punishment and redemption. Ten Days' Wonder exudes a sort of occluded Catholicism, a quality that the young Chabrol detected in the work of Hitchcock, who has been a heavy and not entirely salutary influence on him. Everything is rather uninterestingly out of control here, including Orson Welles. When Welles arches an eyebrow he undergoes such convulsions that it appears he is trying to launch a great hairy boomerang off his face and into the stratosphere. .J.C.

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