Cinema: Pressure Cooker

The Kitchen (A.C.T. Films; Kingsley) is a socialist shocker—socialist because the kitchen in question is a ferocious attack on what’s left of the profit system in Britain, a shocker in the sense that a steaming tureen of stew is a shocker when flung full in a customer’s face. Adapted from a play by Arnold Wesker, a soapbox socialist and onetime pastry cook who at 29 is currently the fashionable prole among Britain’s angry young dramatists. The Kitchen describes with stupendous drive a day in the help’s half of a big London restaurant.

As the day begins, the early man stirs in his sleep on the kitchen floor, gets up and lights the grill. One by one the others arrive. The chef is a narrow-eyed old-timer who minds his peas and cutlets. The fish cook (Carl Mohner) is a burly young German bursting with aggressive force, manic charm, balked ambition and jealous lust for a pretty, flirty waitress (Mary Yeomans). The butcher is a steady boozer who loathes the “lousy forriners” he works with and keeps squalling:’ “Speak bloody English!” The vegetable cook is a soiled blimp who waggles her massive breasts at the salad chef but insists that the lower echelons observe the proper necking order. The proprietor is a muttering overfed Levantine who furtively patrols the shadows, peering suspiciously at his employees, flapping his jowls and sobbing quietly: “Sabotage!”

Work begins slowly. The men lounge in corners, chatting about home and family, pinching the waitresses as they arrive. Slowly the tempo of preparation rises. Cleavers whack, pots rattle, steam billows up. Jokes and insults fly like salt and pepper; the chef gives the back of his nasty old tongue to a cook caught pilfering a pullet; the broiler man tips a pot of boiling water off a rack and—YEEEOOOWWW!

Silence. The men sit eating.

The midday rush begins. “Four plaice! . . . Two turbot! … I got six steaks! . . . Four plaice, please, ducks! . . . Three cutlets, Hans! . . . Two omelettes! . . . Four cod, lover boy! Ye canna be a slow coach here!” Waitresses scream, cooks curse, knives flash, fat crackles, urns squeal, sweat spews out of every pore and food leaps furiously from pot to plate as though it were alive. Faster the pace, wilder the tumult. Like a runaway reactor, like a Beethoven rising to full frenzy the great kitchen gathers itself and surges, thunders, mindlessly explodes in a tremendous climax of comestibles.

Silence. The cooks lie sprawled in sweat, stinking and blissful. “It’s lovely. It’s nothing. It’s the break.” One by one they get up, stretch, talk wistfully of places they would like to live, things they would like to do. Savagely the German mocks them. “This place, this madhouse will always be here. When you go, when I go—the kitchen stays. When we die it goes on. We work here, sweat our guts out, and yet . . . it’s nothing. The kitchen means nothing to you and you mean nothing to the kitchen, nothing!”

The evening rush begins. The German, pressed too hard, grabs a cleaver, runs amok, chops the main gas line. The kitchen, the social order, the whole vast conspiracy of unmeaning that, as Playwright Wesker sees it, prisons and demeans mankind, is interrupted, annulled. The owner stands stupefied. “You stopped my world,” he mumbles. “Did you have permission from God? You work, you eat,

I give you money. That’s life, isn’t it? I live in the right world, don’t I? You stopped this world. Why? Is there something I don’t know? What more do you want? What is there more?”

Playwright Wesker’s dialectic is flimsy and his metaphor is strained, but his theater is terrific. Transferring such theater to the screen is about as tetchy an operation as carrying nitroglycerin in a sieve, but Director James Hill, in his first full-length film, has done the job with a sure hand. He shuts the spectator up in that hellhole of a kitchen until he feels like a cabbagehead after 74 minutes in a pressure cooker. If Leftist Wesker expects moviegoers, at the end of the film, to rise and shake off their chains, he is going to be disappointed. They will hardly have the strength to rise and put on their coats.