Star Wars author was only programmed for profit

Scan page 8

BOOKS THE BASIC WRITINGS OF TROTSKY - Edited v Irving Howe. €3.95 plus 30p p&p All available from WSL, 31. Dartmorth Park Till. London NWS IR. ilable from WSL artistic sub-humourists who conceived it were, at the very least rigidly programmed.

The objective is to make as much profit as possible.

To do this the trick is very simple. You look at all the most commercially successful films or genres of film ever produced, take the most characteristic cliches and climaxes, put them all into the context of one story, which in this case is an interplanetary war. With any luck this should produce a tim, the total of whose profits is even greater than the sum of the profits of its component plagiarised parts.

Supremely competent Of course it all has to be done competently. And this film is supremely competent in the camera work, in the special effects (as effective as, but much less self-indulgently used, than in Kubrick's 2001) in the imaginative design of weird space creatures and monsters.

But although its technical effects are responsible for several of the tens of millions of dollars spent already, they can hardly be the key to the astounding overall commercial success of the tilm.

The secret of that must be in the combination of well tried formulae.

First of all, the film is 'ominated by a very basic lod guys versus bad guys ury. The bad guys in the anmand post of their ul:

ite interplanetary weapon, ‹nachine which can destros tole planets. 1ook and have-not accident:

her like Nazi genera rld War Il films Ind one of mblances possessed by good SIOD World War British pilots. The penultimate scene, in which the good guys destroy the enemy's interplanetary V2 by pin-point bombing is a masterly summation of the climaxes to the Battle of Britain, The Dam Busters ind 633 Squadron Space-age mystic One almost expects Sir Michael Redgrave to be in the background working out the technology. Instead, almost as good, we have Sir Alec Guiness as a space-age mystic, telling the pilots to abandon their inhibitions and The force will guide and protect them (a deft touch of the biblical epic here).

The two entirely characterless heroes of the film slip, effortlessly, however, into many stock roles. Both of them spend most of their time trying to rescue a princess of Hollywoodmedieval appearance (both modelled by the computer, no doubt, on the moneyspinning Ivanhoe and its successors).

Tarzan-like

One of them is a Sinbadstyle space pirate, and the other an expert at escaping from his pursuers by making farzan-like leaps on strands ›t of lichen but of rein rced nylon rope across "sms, lutching his ane, or this "ase Mismie pr laW The heroes get involved in just about every kind of fight (another medieval epic touch) a sword fight with space-age lazer beam swords.

Our inspired heroes and the icy princess at one point get stuck in a pool of water in which lumps of scrap metal float and which, is inhabited by an unseen snapping monster, the passing nod in of Star Wars' the top of the Jaws.

Wizard While the princess nothing like Judy Garland, there are several other characters whom the computer has picked out of that tireless commercial success The Wizard of Oz. The lion in there (toughened up a bit as the first mate on the pirate space craft : the scarecrow is substituted by a three-legged computer; and the tin man (as a gold plated robot) is transferred complete with exactly the same personality.

In fact it is these two latter characters which tend to confirm the suspicion that Star Wars is the creation of a computer, since they are portrayed with a sentimentalised affection usually reserved by the commercial cinema for animals and children.

Theme Even the theme music, attributed to John Williams, which you can buy on the way out to swell the profits, in the same spirit-a clever musical anagram of themes of which that from Lawrence of Arabia. and Somewhere Over the Rainbow from the Wizard of Oz were the most ubvious star posite mi Is une cultural equivalent of TV dinners-predictable and effortlessly the lowest common denomination of film culture.

Its characters are faceless computer's the direction predecessor at profits league, of Oz for sale represents City in cu naar digestible.

it Is on which to hang the plot.

It is a totally escapist film.

The viewer need not suffer the slightest twinge of psychological, emotional, social or political concern. The only speculation on the social life of the Star Wars universe is a brief reference to 'racial' discrimination against computers (further proof of the authorship?) and the only reference to its politics is the completely spurious 'antiimperialist' nature of the war.

The "ideas of Star Wars never get beyond technological and visual fantasy.

Of course it is nothing exceptional for capitalism to make profits through producing escapist entertainment. Those responsible for this most profitable movie of time. however. have THE STALIN SCHOOL OF ew Park Edition €1.50 plus 30g THE TRANSITIONAL PROG ith a glossary 30p plus 10p p&/ TRI TRADE UNION IDE 90p plus 10p p& 02-7. brought to techniques done.

Natural

film's release whose cedents were the record-holder Jaws Exorcist. In this advertising dramatic reactions are such a way t 'news'. BBC meet audience the tirst pe report on theil they had just transport disaster This new level by which thi disaster This concerns not only the cynicism of the construction of the plot, but also on advertising campains before the only preprevious and The kind of audience pred icted in Tat it becomes corres sondents i comi ig out of rform ince to condi tion as if endur ed some lent This trend is something of IS NOI a breakthrough for the advertisers since it succeeds in blurring the difference between "biased' publicity and 'impartial' news media.

4 challenge to Star Wars' world profit record has already appeared. Directed by the creator of the deposed champion, Jaws, it is called Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Royal family

In addition to using the same successful advertising tricks as its predecessors, it has also succeeded in bringing the royal family into the publicity machine by getting the film chosen for a "command performance"

But it remains to be seen whether the semi-documentary pretensions of the new challenger will be an obstacle to its commercial success.

As for Star Wars it is a significant irony that today as in the 1930s, capitalismbeset by a massive crisis of profitability and unable to resolve any basic problems of the masses, still manages to rake in some money by selling mindless fantasies to audiences made more receptive by the problems which the capitalist crisis itself has created.

This commercial triumph for capitalism is a step backwards in the cultural history of the cinema.

By Gee Piggott

Scan page 9

RESS, edness