Quick Cuts

By J.C.

INNOCENT BYSTANDERS is like a remnant from Carnaby Street, a vestige of the unmourned days of trendy English film making when everything was sharp angles and bilious color, like a 20-quid suit. It is mostly the usual spy stuff, terse and vicious, with Stanley Baker as an aging agent sent out on his last big job. Its dizzying intrigue of counterplots and triplecrosses probably would have worked better if Director Peter Collinson had not tried to slick it up with a lot of addled editing and improbable violence. Given the prevailing tone of careless hokum, two peformances are triumphant. Donald Pleasence appears as the head of intelligence, a man hilariously paralyzed by decorum. He is immaculately polite and sinister, whether ordering a libation or a liquidation. Pleasence's ambition is to run to ground an elusive agronomist portrayed by Vladek Sheybal, whose huge eyes pop out of his head like a couple of painted Ping Pong balls. Sheybal brings off a flaw less vocal impression of Peter Lorre, with the same slightly lisping tones that sound threatening and tubercular at the same time, as if he might run short of breath before he was through telling you to stick your hands up.

LIMBO concerns the woes of three P.O.W. wives waiting out the war in a Florida military town. Although filmed on location, the movie could have been ground out on the back lot of Universal City for all the sense of place-- or just sense-- that it displays. In his eagerness to cast unknowns, Director Mark Robson must have passed over some good actors. Most of his energies, and those of Scenarists Joan Silver and James Bridges, seem to have been poured into creating stereotypes with whom every member of the audience could identify, no matter what their politics. There is a bitter, continuously frustrated campaigner against the war (Kathleen Nolan), a vociferous, tirelessly anti-Communist booster of the military effort (Katherine Justice), and a neutral, who nevertheless gets a little queasy when shown some scenes of maimed North Vietnamese children (Kate Jackson). The movie is painstak qed qeding in its refusal to take any kind of stand at all, other than a rather strong suggestion that war plays hob with hearth and home.

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