Cinema Canada (Mar-Apr 1975)

realized quality of the screenplay is reflected in the film’s visual style. Henry Fiks’ photography is often, in individual shots and sequences, dramatically expressive. The hotel milieu provides natural visual images which are employed to advantage: the stairwells, the empty foyer, the corridors and the frosted-glass fire doors. For a low-budget movie it’s often pretty good-looking. But there’s a tendency to resort fitfully to various contradictory cinematic modes: heightening effects without point, using dramatic angles on insignificant events, and, paradoxically, failing to handle effectively scenes which call for visual excitement. Examples of this latter weakness are the hide-and-seek sequence in the hotel basement, the scenes of Billy’s female impersonation (he wears a blond wig about as indifferently as he might borrow an old hat), and the culminating frenzy of the gang-assault. Apparently some scenes so completely failed to come off that they were cut from the final version, notably a scene of Billy’s sensational appearance in drag in the St. Thomas carnival parade. By contrast, or perhaps by necessity, the editing of 125 Rooms is consistently crisp and professional, a credit to Tom Berner and Gordon McClellan. The opening sequences and a very classy title-montage deserve special mention. When you have a low budget, limited experience, scanty resources, and no opportunity to extend the shoot, stop and rethink, or take whole sequences over again — a resourceful editor, who can take what you came back with and make it work, is your most valuable asset. This was my 100th Canadian feature film. I’m grateful to the producer, Don Haig, for arranging a screening for me, and must say that he seemed like a wonderfully humane and realistic person for a young director to be managed by. Despite the generally critical tone of my remarks, I believe that the film deserves exhibition and the attention of Canadian audiences. The future of a worthwhile Canadian film culture remains with the Patrick Louberts and the 125 Rooms, rather than with any number of Rocking Boats, Children under Leaves, and Black Christmasses. Robert Fothergill *This review first appeared in Canadian Forum. Will the Real Johnny Canuck please stand up? When does the hard part being? When an empty dream and a few bruises are all that’s left to show for forty years of a man’s life. When he must face the truth and live with it. Jim King once had a dream. Like so many others before him and so many more to come, he saw fame and fortune in the world of Country and Western music. Goodbye West Eden, Ontario. Lookout Nashville, Tennessee. And now, years later, he is a singer, the King of ‘““King and Country, the Best in Country and Western”. But Nashville is still looking. King hasn’t made it yet. This week he’s playing West Eden. It’s a return engagement. The Hard Part Begins is something of a road film. And true to that tradition, King indeed finds you can’t go back. He takes the gig with some understandable reluctance, knowing that he’s due midweek in Toronto to talk contract with Hurricane sound, the most important recording company in the country, and knowing too that it could be both his first and final big chance. And yet here he is, after all of these years, heading right back where he started as if nothing had ever happened. Not an encouraging sign. He has paid his dues, living the sad little life that he sings of in his sad little songs. Country and Western music has always had an acute, if somewhat sentimental sense of the harder realities, a sense which is clearly reflected in Paul Lynch’s direction of The Hard Part Begins. It’s blue-collar existence. Of necessity, he has become a bit of a con-artist. And taken by his personable charm and persausive optimism, others have been quick to tie their dreams to his star. There are the women. Jenny Frame, for one, is his girl-friend and King and Country’s “other” singer. She’s not just some chick that he picked up on a whim, inevitably to be kicked out of his life on the road between one gig and the next. She is, if he only knew how to accept it, their ticket to Nashville. Ironically, she doesn’t share his passion for singing; she’s happy just to be a part of his life, hoping someday that they might settle down together. Someday when he has finally made it. For a long time she wants to believe that he will. There are the men. Duane Eccles is King and Country’s steel guitarist and although he’s too busy enjoying himself to be much of a musician, he faithfully believes that King will take him along when the time comes. Together with the band’s dope smoking drummer, Roxon, the hard drinking Eccles personifies the conflict between Country culture and the Rock culture which is gradually replacing it on the beer hall circuit and dooming Jim King to obsolescence should he fail to leave it behind. There are others too, old friends and enemies from West Eden who view his return with some, if only passing interest. A bitter ex-wife, a troubled son, a dying friend: all have shared King’s dream of success at one time or another. And optimist that he is, King doesn’t hesitate to let them all know that his time has come. Nashville, by way of Toronto, awaits. ... It simply remains for him to learn the truth, that it is Jenny Frame who has caught the ear of Hurricane Sound. Young, pretty and vulnerable girl singers are popular these days. Has-beens, so they say, are not. For a moment, King handles the truth badly, the old charm suddenly wears a little thin, the confidence has been shaken. He still has his pride though, as much in his music as in himself. And there will always be other dreamers who are eager to jump on his bandwagon in pursuit of their own fame and fortune. The show will go on. * * Kk K So, what in the name of John A. Macdonald are we going to do with all of these Johnny Canucks, so often and so conveniently thought to _ be “‘losers’’? Enjoy them perhaps. And forget this business about losers. It’s an easy label and says as much for the Canadian sense of individualism as it does for the Canadian hero. Irrepressible and irresponsible, Jim King and others like him, The Rowdyman Will Cole and a Paperback Hero Rick Dillon, to name but two who are remarkably similar, are some of the very few truly colourful characters that this country Cinema Canada 59