Quick Cuts

By J.C.

THE RAGMAN'S DAUGHTER is one of those English proletarian soap operas, done up this time with a patina of gloss. The script was written by Alan Sillitoe (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning) in what could only have been a fit of self-loathing. An unhappy employee in a cheese factory, approaching middle age and dwelling on the glum fringes of the lower middle class, recalls a teen-age romance with the ragman's daughter. She was a lustrous girl who came riding down his street on a horse, smiling in soft focus. With glistening white teeth and flowing blond hair, she lacked only a tube of Clairol or smile-brightening toothpaste to make the image complete. Simon Rouse and Patrick O'Connell portray, respectively, the factory worker at adolescence and maturity, and have in common only a kind of grumpy indifference that is supposed to pass for alienation. Victoria Tennant, the ragman's daughter, is suitably lubricious. She has the comeliness of a model, although it must be said in some sorrow that she acts rather like a British Ali MacGraw. It is only of fleeting consolation that she looks nifty in knee socks.

CATCH MY SOUL introduces Othello to John the Baptist, and they do not get along. A muddle of Shakespeare and Scripture, the movie is frenziedly directed by Patrick McGoohan, and set to an overabundance of limpid rock music. Singer Richie Havens shows up as Othello, here portrayed as a back-country evangelist, and lets fly with a song every few minutes. lago is enacted by one Lance Le Gault, whose previous employment as a choreographer on Elvis Presley movies comes as no surprise. He leaps into the air a lot, and sometimes comes down. . J.C. .c.

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