Cinema: Razor-Edged Slapstick

CuldeSac. Roman Polanski, 33, is the Paris-born Pole who three years ago captured an international audience with a precocious thriller called Knife in the Water. Knife in hand, this switchbloc Hitchcock then went West and persuaded British producers to finance a small masterpiece of menace called Repulsion. His third film, also made in England, is a jittery-tittery comedy of terrors in which Polanski hones his slapstick to a razor-edge.

Cul-de-Sac was shot in a 13th century fortress perched on a precipitous knap that rises out of Holy Island, a dot in the North Sea off the coast of Northumberland. There all alone lives a rather odd couple: a flabby old fool (Donald Pleasence) who dismally fails to satisfy the snippy little chippy (Françoise Dorléac) he has recently wed. She lusts for excitement, and suddenly she gets it. A mobster on the lam (Lionel Slander) staggers into the castle one fine day and institutes a nerve-shredding reign of terror: flashes his firearms, slashes the phone wires, crashes the liquor closet, mashes the host’s nose, lashes the wife’s bottom, smashes the family Jag, and generally behaves like the sort of fire-breathing, tear-dropping dragon who traditionally inhabits a medieval castle and wonders wistfully, as he adds another visitor to the three-story bone-pile in his parlor, why nobody loves poor little old him.

The story has been told on film before (The Petrified Forest, He Ran All the Way, Desperate Hours), but Polanski tells it in a manner cannily calculated to propagate tension. Tension is set up between Romanesque stones that soothe the eye and electronic jazz that grates the ear. Tension is set up in the script, which systematically intersperses-interfuses episodes of horror and hilarity. Tension is set up by the camera, which in frame after frame lets the danger lurk just out of sight until the onlooker feels like a man cooped up with a cobra he cannot see.

Tension is set up most intensely in the sadic electricity that crackles between the principals. Pleasence plays the husband as the abject dog beneath the good grey skin of a middle-aged respectable who has made his pile and lost his nerve, as a whipped cur whining, wriggling, licking, leaking, crawling on its belly in pathetic need to please. Dorléac plays the wife as a bitch-kitty who doesn’t know she is alive unless she is sinking her claws into some poor hound. Slander, in the funniest and most sinister performance of his long screen career, plays the gangster as an amiable, fair-minded monsler who is only loo happy to kick a dog if a kick is what the dog really wants. Al 58 This magnificent crum-bum comic looks like King Kong after 30 years of marriage to Fay Wray, and when he opens his mouth, he sounds like that genial gorilla gargling streetcars.