The Pyramid Climber

By Stefan Kanfer

"It's a sorry sight to see the English at their pleasures," observes an Irish Liverpudlian in The Reckoning. Sorrier still it is to see the dislocated Hibernians at theirs. For the ancients, there is the public house where they undergo the peculiar process Yeats called "withering into truth." For the film's protagonist, Michael Marler (Nicol Williamson), there is London pyramid climbing--ascending corporate strata by using the bow-and-scrape to superiors and the knee-in-groin against competitors.

Smarmy beggar, this Marler; one would walk a block out of one's way to cut him dead. Put him down in a maze or a sewer and he would run as hard. Michael's social self is pathological. With colleagues, he does not talk, he connives. As for women--including his mistress Rachel Roberts--he never makes love with them but at them. Even his father's death elicits a distorted reaction. The old man has been beaten by a Liverpool Teddy boy. The Irish cronies, suddenly repossessed by memories of the Black and Tans, keen for revenge. Marler coshes the killer with such sadistic delight that the viewer wonders whether the revenge is pure, or mere self-satisfaction.

Can such a man literally get away with murder? He can--and he also makes a good deal of money and a good many women in the process. The Reckoning offers no consolation and no solution. Williamson, however, does. For this remarkable performer always carries with him a moral force.

Armed only with the script's Vance Packard sociology and minor motivation, he thrusts at the viewer an organization man without his bowler, his brolly--or his skin. Raised in the blackened sidestreets of Liverpool, Marler, the former Jesuit novice, has created a future by annihilating his past. But his past is overwhelming, an overpowering part of himself.

Now he cannot even carry a tune or complete a prayer. But, Williamson demonstrates, the attributes of his youth are linked like traits in a gene. Denying one, he has denied them all: poverty, humanity, lyricism, grace. The boy whose father could not find work now cannot find joy. His sooty origins have become as nothing to the putrefaction of his workdays. That is the master actor's detailed and tragic interpretation, the only justification needed to see the film at all.

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