A Moll and Her Night Visitors

By RICHARD CORLISS

SCANDAL

Directed by Michael Caton-Jones; Screenplay by Michael Thomas

Britain's Minister of War John Profumo, husband of refined movie star Valerie Hobson, has been sharing the sexual favors of teen tart Christine Keeler with Soviet spy Eugene Ivanov . . . Keeler's blond pal Mandy Rice- Davies, 18, declared in court that she had bedded Lord Astor and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. . . . Mariella Novotny, who claims John F. Kennedy among her lovers, hosted an all-star orgy where a naked gent, thought to be film director and Prime Minister's son Anthony Asquith, implored guests to beat him . . . Osteopath and artist Stephen Ward, whose portrait subjects include eight members of the Royal Family, has been charged with pimping Keeler and Rice- Davies to his posh friends. Part of Ward's bail was reportedly posted by young financier Claus von Bulow.

Talk about your dish! In 1963 English gossip columnists figured they had died and gone to tabloid heaven. When these peccadilloes hit the front pages, you couldn't tell the players without a Who's Who and a Burke's Peerage. The scandal, a wild party held at the sunset of imperial Britain, brought down Harold Macmillan's Tory government and ushered in the era of Swinging London: the Beatles, miniskirts, free love and pricey drugs.

Scandal is an express tour of the Profumo affair that moves with a pop historian's revisionist swagger and plays like News of the World headlines set to early '60s rock 'n' roll. Taking a cue from Asquith's Pygmalion, the film casts Ward (John Hurt) as an aristocratic makeover artist, discovering Keeler (Joanne Whalley-Kilmer) in the fetid anonymity of a Soho strip club and turning her into a star of the jet-set slumming circuit. Pluck your eyebrows, Christine. Wet your lips. Come over and say hi to Jack Profumo.

Stephen loves Christine, in his fashion. He pampers his girls and introduces them to his randy friends because he likes being liked. His sin is in assuming, like nearly everyone who jestered near the thrones of power in Britain and America, that the games could be pubic without ever going public. Enter Profumo (Ian McKellen), who in his high-domed hairdo looks like a samurai of probity. Jack is an indiscretion waiting to happen. He has so little furtive pleasure to gain, and so much reputation to put at risk, that his dalliance has the lurid fatalism of a soap opera. Then Christine snitches to the press, and domestic melodrama stokes national tragedy.

Scandal, whose producers had to snip a few naughty bits from the Novotny orgy to avoid an X rating in the U.S., is wonderfully performed by Hurt (pained irony), McKellen (droll reserve) and, as Rice-Davies, Peter Fonda's daughter Bridget (comic acuity). The film names names and gets the tone right. ! This is a morally exhausted society, where every woman is a whore and every man a pimp or a trick until proved otherwise. It has no hero or heroine, only a victim: Stephen Ward, who loved trashy women and was betrayed by distinguished men.