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In cinematic terms, Richardson is not a great director—not by a long chalk. By temperament and training he is a stage director, and sometimes he is a very good one. He is clever at casting and knows how to make the most of a strong player. Under his tutelage Albert Finney, Rita Tushingham, Tom Courtenay and Rachel Roberts have become international cinema attractions. But moviegoers are getting a bit bugged by that same scummy old roofscape and the eternal kitchen-sinkdrome. They sometimes find it a bit hard to believe that things are really all that bad in Merry England. Yet at their best, the British protest pictures have served up great juicy chunks of local color, and they have handsomely displayed six or eight of the most talented young cinemactors in the world.
Outside the Epicenter. Britain, Italy, France: Western Europe is currently at the epicenter of the new cinema. But can the center hold? Secondary concentrations of film production are forming rapidly all over the world—some of them behind the Iron Curtain. In Poland there is a small but fiercely active cell of film fiends. Director Polanski is obviously a completely prepared professional, and Andrzej Wajda, the Polish Kurosawa, is even more accomplished. When his two tragedies of battle (Ashes and Diamonds, Kanal) were released in the U.S. in 1961, they startled moviegoers with their black intensity. Hungarian production has doubled in the last ten years, and in the last three years the quality of the movies that come out of Moscow (The Cranes Are Flying, Ballad of a Soldier, My Name Is Ivan) has steeply improved.
In the free world outside Europe, cinematic creation is even more gingery.
In India there is Satyajit Ray, 42, a onetime commercial artist in Calcutta who has proved himself one of cinema's greatest natural talents. In the last five years, six of Ray's films have been released in the U.S., and every one of the six swells with the fullness of life and glows with the light of the spirit. His first three pictures (Father Panchali, Aparajito, The World of Apu) made up a trilogy that speaks a thousand volumes about life in India and stands as the supreme masterpiece of the Asian cinema. The films that follow it (Devi, Two Daughters, The Music Room) are even more accomplished. They are beautiful to look at and musical to be with. They are quiet films, as all deep things are quiet. They are not in a hurry to happen, they take time to live. They experience life, they experience death. Nothing human is alien to them. They are works of love.
In Argentina there is Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, 39, the Bergman of the Antipodes. He is by no means a great artist, but his films (The End of Innocence, Hand in the Trap) are intelli gent, tasteful, passionate and relentlessly true to life in Argentina. And they get better year by year.
In the U.S., when most people think of movies they still think of Hollywood. But the new American cinema is not coming out of Hollywood—it is springing up in New York. There are art houses, film libraries and terribly strange little film groups that meet at midnight in Greenwich Village garrets and show movies about nail biting and things.
It is all wonderfully stimulating, and since the late '50s several hundred people have been running all over town trying to make independent pictures.