Bellamy on Broadway

'Night Games' unreels more like a nightmare

By Peter Bellamy, Entertainment Editor

NEW YORK-A voyeur's delight, and a nutsy, obscene and sometimes revolting film.

That is the moving picture "Night Games," the showing of which at a recent West Coast film festival impelled Shirley Temple to resign from its sponsoring committee. I can hardly blame her.

This Swedish film has had would-be censors frothing at the mouth. When it plays Cleveland, as it is scheduled to do, they will be in full cry.

One of the scenes involves a mother and her young son in what appears to be either an incestuous or perverted relationship. It is graphic and clinical in several details.

Aside from this scene and another that reaches the depth of bad taste "Night Games" is another one of those stream of consciousness movies. It is reminiscent of "Last Year At Marienbad." Nobody ever did find out what that was about,

FILMS of this type are like phony modern artists who stand at a distance and throw gobs of paint of different colors at a

Peter Bellamy, The Plain Dealer's entertainment editor, is in New York looking over dramatic and movie offerings.

SCHEMELOVED TRANSINDÝR

canvas. The results are absurd, but there's always some stunned critic who would pronouce it a masterpiece of abstraction.

"Night Games" would appear, and I say that advisedly, to be the struggle of a man to overcome impotence induced by a childhood with a depraved mother. It is in great part told flashback.

Whether some of the characters are

figments of a feverish imagination I know not. However, the spectator is stuck with all of them and I found it quite a trial,

The story is told against a background of a large old magnificent rococo Swedish mansion, which the impotent man has inherited from his mother and into which he brings his fiancee. There he is either haunted or actually bothered by the coterie that inhabited the house in his mother's day.

THE CHILDBIRTH scene with its screaming graphic detail might well win the 1967 award for cinematic bad taste. The interlude in which a young boy shows his homosexual tendencies, by wearing his mother's mules and using her makeup, false eyelashes and wig is a model of discrimination compared to it.

The characters infesting the mansion include a couple of play girls of the vacant stare type and several particularly overripe offensive homosexuals. One of them suggests Nero of ancient Rome.

Then there is a jazz combo which plays for drunken revels and is not above jazzing up the wedding march.

The batty grandmother is a real pip. She likes to cut the heads off decorated hard boiled eggs. After she has set paper. dolls on fire she plays the harmonica madly.

There is only one topless scene in which the fiancee appears. Since she has a lovely figure and her appearance in this condition is not attended by any sizzling love scene I didn't find it offensive.

THERE IS also a spot of exhibitionism and fetishism in the film. The latter is the less palatable because it involves the young boy.

Much of the dialogue is of the idiot shock kind. The mother at one point says: "All that comes out of men is compliments and vomit. I prefer the vomit because it is more honest." It follows that there is a throwing up episode later in the film.

Oh yes, there's also a scene in which a woman, having been brutally tossed out of a truck into a pouring rain, gets a large kick out of wallowing in the mud.

AT THE end of the film the once-again virile male and his bride blow the mansion to smithereens. I wish they had done it several hours before.

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There was some laughter in the wrong places and not a few walkouts at the festival theater, where I saw "Night Games," but I had to stick to the bitter end. I found it a windy, pretentious bore. The mother and son scene is going to infuriate and appall a number of people. It is asking for trouble. I couldn't believe my eyes at first.

There are those who try to justify suchscenes by saying that any part of life belongs on the screen. Such specious reason. ing would justify footage of people being burned alive along with the sound track of their agonized screams. It would also justify hard-core pornography.

"Night Games" is an example of how dangerously producers are flirting closer and closer to the line of hard-core pornogfilm is so ridiculous in many raphy. Th aspects, it's difficult to tell whether it is well-acted or not. However the young son horis featured in the offensive scene with his mother had best change his name and retire from the screen.