The Green Man

At a time when at least a small part of our nation is brooding pessimistically about the problems of golf, desegregation, and nuclear weapons, it is comforting to be shown, in The Green Man, that bombs can be fun.

The film has an enormous virtue that too few comic films share: it takes itself lightly, playing with exaggeration and outrageousness, purposely stretching our ideas of reality and probability. It creates a mood within which we can laugh easily at a man whose commendable but legally dubious hobby is building bombs to explode pompous bores. Instead of being told, "This is reality," (which might be mildly grim, we are in effect told, "This is a caricature of reality."

Mr. Alastair Sim is exactly the thing as the genial assassin. His simultaneously prunelike, condescending, and Machiavellian face and manner weave much distinguished nonsense in and out of the philosophic bomber's career--a career whose explosive beginning has included an overbearing headmaster, an overstuffed businessman, and an oversmug dictator. All were neatly vaporized before the war, during which the bomber quit his activities temporarily because killing dropped from an art to an occupation. When we meet him now, he is back in practice; his prey is Sir Gregory Upshott, an international water-muddier. Sim stalks him intently and wittily, particularly in a demonstration of chessmanship during which Sim deftly diverts a policeman's attention while moving a dead body.

Unfortunately, there are other incidental characters scattered about for various reasons, and some of them detract considerably from the fun. George Cole is unnecessarily tedious as a naive vacuum cleaner salesman, and Jill Adams's prettiness does not hide her bland acting as a bride-to-be with whom Cole gets entangled under a bed.

Luckily, Colin Gordon seems less serious about his role as her crisp BBC-announcer finance; with a formidably stiff upper lip, a brandished umbrella, and a violent nasal accent he successfully spoofs exactly the roles he usually plays. Terry-Thomas, as a genial philanderer, briefly does much the same thing.

All characters are given fairly bright dialogue, and both their words and their action often openly satirize English customs. The whole film is one of Britain's better exercises in comic style, and for Sim himself, in his familiar genre, it is a tour de force.

The Green Man will leave the Exeter Street Theatre after Saturday evening.