Hecksapoppin

By JAY COCKS

SHOUT AT THE DEVIL

Directed by PETER HUNT Screenplay by STANLEY PRICE,

ALASTAIR REID and WILBUR SMITH

Just after Shout at the Devil has got started and takes a second to catch its breath, the audience has already been treated to an elephant hunt in search of ivory, a bushwhacking, a crocodile attack, a ship ramming, several pratfalls and--this being colonial Africa and all--several glimpses of bare-breasted native women. Lee Marvin, playing a bibulous adventurer named Flynn, and Roger Moore, appearing as Sebastian Oldsmith, an entirely too credulous old Eton boy fallen on hard times, alternately flail away at and consort with each other in a variety of cockeyed attempts to earn a dishonest dollar.

Oldsmith falls hard for Flynn's daughter Rosa (Barbara Parkins), who nurses him through a bout of malaria. Rosa tells her father she is pregnant at about the same time that Oldsmith makes a formal request for her hand in marriage. "What!" splutters the indignant father. "You ask for her hand when you've had everything else!" Of course there is a terrible fight, followed, in rough sequence, by a wedding, the birth of a daughter and the start of the first World War, which finds Flynn and his new family involved in fresh adventures, none more credible than any that have gone before.

Shout at the Devil is certainly silly, and looks something of a shambles be sides, but it is a jolly enough enterprise, bumptiously entertaining in its own feckless way. Marvin overacts outrageously, sometimes lapsing into a full-fledged imitation of W.C. Fields gone native. Parkins is pretty, and Moore deft and quite amusing as a sort of good-hearted dolt. Director Peter Hunt (Gold) got his start as film editor on the early James Bond adventures and knows how to work on the funny bone even as he stages a punchy scene. The movie hardly wants for plot or action, but could have done with a little more sense. This, however, might have slowed it down or even tripped it up completely. Shout at the Devil is best just speeding along on its own goofy way.

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