UDK Movie Review: The Quiller Memorandum
Guinness and Pinter can't salvage 'Quiller'
By SCOTT NUNLEY
The work of Alec Guinness, Harold Pinter, and John Barry is lost in the attempt to salvage "The Quiller Memorandum." Adam Hall's novel suffers from an absence of color, action, and suspense and the movie version adds little more.
The new psycho-spy novel elaborately avoids externals and concentrates upon the interior of its "hero." The prime thesis of the psycho-spy thriller is that espionage is a dirty game that soils those who play it.
Le Carre's "The Spy Who Came In From The Cold" managed to succeed in this unlikely adventure genre because Alex Leamas caught the attention of the reader. Richard Burton helped transfer Leamas to the screen with all the complex humanity of the middle-aged spy intact. Neither novelist Hall nor actor Segal have this talent.
As a result, "Quiller" is merely a slow film. The externals have been played down, to be sure. But no internal depths emerge from what remains basically a shallow movie.
However, many critics have found praise for "The Quiller Memorandum." Playright Harold
Pinter's screenplay is lauded as though the film were another "Homecoming." In fact, Pinter's crippled conversation is obvious in the movie, interrupted the film with no useful effect.
Alec Guinness as Pol, Quiller's Berlin chief, best employs the Pinter dialogue. Guinness brings to his lines the quality of mime that can evoke so much meaning from a brief Pinter speech. But George Segal utterly flounders when faced by the Broadway playwright's version of Quiller.
The original novel, not Pinter's rewrite, must be credited for the best scene of the movie: the drug-torture of Quiller. Here the conflict of wills between Nazi and British agent flashes to a brilliant point. As the torturer utilizes words to attack Quiller's mind, Quiller responds with a desperate defense of words.
Even John Barry, the gifted composer of such exciting motion picture scores as "Goldfinger," is buried in the tedium of "The Quiller Memorandum." The talents of supporting actors, screenwriters, and composers can not animate the corpse of a dead film.
The people say...
To the editor:
I was disturbed by your back page advertisement in March 23th's UDK. The ad was for a speed reading course which was presented in the form of a case history of one Tom Hall. The "message" of the tale was that speed reading will help the student (sic) get his academic work out of the way so that he can devote his time and energies to playing baseball and having dates. Academic work becomes a bothersome chore for a college student to be gotten over with as
quickly as possible. The second and third paragraphs of this ad present the theme succinctly:
"Tom admits that for eight weeks his schedule was worse than usual, his baseball was at stake. Women just had to wait!
Now that the course is over, Tom is still no egghead—or professor. Baseball's still his first love. But there is one difference—Tom now reads 10 times faster. He finishes his work before it finishes him! And he's still eligible for the team."
Aside from the cliché-ridden
Sincerely yours,
Philip Weiss, Jr.
Philadelphia, Pa.
graduate student
The Daily Kansan, student newspaper at The University of Kansas, is represented by National Advertising Service, 18 East 50 St. New York, N.Y. 10022. The University of Kansas postage paid at Lawrence, Kan., every afternoon during the University year except Saturdays and Sundays. University holidays and examination periods. Commissions, goods, services and employment advertised in the University Department are offered to all students without regard to color, creed or national origin.
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS
language and poor grammar, this infantile, anti-intellectual theme is hardly one that should appear in a responsible university publication.
GUEST STAR
HOLLYWOOD — (UPI) — Comedian Hans Conried will guest star as a space knight in a segment of television's "Lost in Space."
Daily Kansan
editorial page
Tuesday, April 11, 1967
2
"GOOD HEAVEN! HAVE YOU TURNED IN YOUR MID-TERM GRADES ALREADY THIS SEMESTER?"
NEW BOOKS
AS I LAY DYING, by William Faulkner (Modern Library, $2.45); SANCTUARY, by William Faulkner (Vintage, $1.63)—One of the best, and one of the most famous, of the many novels by the man touted on these covers as winner of the Nobel prize. Faulkner certainly didn't win the prize for "Sanctuary," but he could have won it for "As I Lay Dying." The latter is one of his most inventive works, a fascinating story of how a family moves a corpse from backwoods home to the town for the buryin' Stylistically it is Faulkner at its best, and there is grim humor that makes it more comedy than tragedy. "Sanctuary" is better than Faulkner himself thought it was, though it depends much more on sensation than do most of his works. This is the story of the spoiled Temple Drake and her adventures in the backwoods with such types as the degenerate Popeye. Violent, brutal and shocking. As is most of Faulkner.
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