Circle Game

By J.C.

THE FIRST CIRCLE

Directed by ALEXANDER FORD Screenplay by ALEXANDER FORD

It is often argued that the translations of the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn do not do him justice. Surely, though, he can never have been served as badly between covers as he is here on screen. This barbarous adaptation of his novel about a prison for Russian intellectuals prunes all the passion, humanity and immediacy from a story that, lacking them, becomes only a meager, melodramatic tale.

Made in Denmark by a Polish director, The First Circle was shot in some approximation of English, then redubbed. The actors exercise their mouths a great deal, trying to shape uncomfortable syllables. Meanwhile, the voices droning smoothly on the sound track have the faintly patronizing, disengaged sound of a troupe from some failed regional theater making an unpleasant living on a soap opera.

The movie is solidly in the tradition of Hollywood barbed-wire melodrama, the kind where Otto Preminger. playing the camp commandant, was always striding about in high black boots, smoking luxuriously and sneering at his desperate charges. Indeed, there is such a character here, a Citizen Major ("I'm not going to fool around with you. If you want to go back to Siberia..."). In the old Hollywood versions, women appeared only in flashbacks. In The First Circle they are present as warders whose proximity causes some inmates to writhe on their bunks of an evening and groan, "Give me a woman."

The prisoners, who are mostly men of science, are all supposed to be working on a project ordered personally by Stalin: a tap-proof phone. But one of their number, Gleb Nerzhin (Gunther Malzacher), keeps finding the time to steal off to a supply closet with one of the warders, Simochka (Elzbieta Czyzewska). "I'd like to leave you with my child," he breathes, lunging for her tunic. "Monday," she shudders, dying to surrender herself but trying also to cope with a pesky short-wave radio that crackles away on a nearby table, summoning her to report. Such sequences evoke memories of Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, who could have had a fine time giving this movie a well-deserved savaging.

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