Suzy's Two: Cynthia & Junction

A line in one of her films describes her as "34, 21, 35, no visible scars," which is like calling the Thames moist. Suzy Kendall has the kind of legs microskirts were made for. Her angular, wide-eyed face nourishes a secret smile and a sensuality that can express itself in a dozen minor keys. Like so many other bright, blonde British birds, she invites comparison with Julie Christie; but in nine films so far, Suzy, now 30, has begun to shape a screen personality all her own. She first drew U.S. viewers' notice as Sidney Poitier's admiring teacher friend in To Sir, with Love, then as the terrorized hostage of The Penthouse. In her two latest films, she displays a widening range, an ability to mix comedy, glamour and poignancy, that eerily evokes memories of her late namesake, Kay Kendall.*

Thirty Is a Dangerous Age, Cynthia is a vanity fair devoted to showing off the talents of Comic-Pianist Dudley Moore, the bedeviled star of Bedazzled and Beyond the Fringe (and Suzy's offscreen escort). This time he plays a 29-year-old jazzman born under the sign of Virgo who worries that "if you don't make it by the time you're 30, you'll never make it." Before reaching that climacteric, he resolves to write a hit musical and get married. Moore manages to do both--and do them comically--thanks in large part to Suzy Kendall's role as the straight girl next door who alters his horoscope.

In such a plotless exercise, the film relies much too heavily on the hero's gnomish appearance and musical abilities: at one point the camera stands still while Moore's trio swings through a long and not very interesting jazz number. Miss Kendall's absurd composure seems more daft and deft than the muggings and pratfalls of the near-hysterical comedians around her.

Up the Junction shouts the ancient news that the rich are different from the poor: they have more money. Into broken-down Battersea comes the classy Kendall, searching for herself. In a few days she finds a factory job, a frowzy flat and a blond boy friend. The appalling squalor of the slums appeals to Kendall, largely because it seems to have the beat of life that was missing from her deadly home across the river in wealthy Chelsea.

Suzy soon gets an acrid whiff of reality when a new-found girl friend at the factory finds herself pregnant. The girl nearly dies at the hands of a drunken abortionist, then recovers and gets engaged to the boy responsible for her trouble. The night of their engagement party, he is knocked off his motorcycle by a lorry and dies in the street; a tragedy has its echo in Kendall's life when her own lover steals a car for their vacation and gets sent down for six months. "I'd much rather have taken the bus," she pleads, lending dignity to a line that, spoken by another actress, might have seemed only maudlin.

Junction is stained with the sooty slum aura that marks much of Poor Cow (TIME, Feb. 9), and with good reason. Both films were adapted from books by Novelist Nell Dunn. Though the story too often has the quality of pulpy sociology, Junction is saved from indistinction by Director Peter Collinson's extraordinary spirit of place, and by Suzy Kendall's chameleonlike ability to look and sound like ten different women in the course of a single film.

*No kin; Suzy's real name is Freda Harriet Harrison.

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