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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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050189
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1990-09-17
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CINEMA, Page 68A Moll and Her Night VisitorsBy Richard Corliss
SCANDAL
Directed by Michael Caton-Jones;
Screenplay by Michael Thomas
Britain's Minister of War John Profumo, husband of refined
movie star Valerie Hobson, has been sharing the sexual favors of
teen tart Christine Keeler with Soviet spy Eugene Ivanov . . .
Keeler's blond pal Mandy Rice-Davies, 18, declared in court that
she had bedded Lord Astor and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. . . . Mariella
Novotny, who claims John F. Kennedy among her lovers, hosted an
all-star orgy where a naked gent, thought to be film director and
Prime Minister's son Anthony Asquith, implored guests to beat him
. . . Osteopath and artist Stephen Ward, whose portrait subjects
include eight members of the Royal Family, has been charged with
pimping Keeler and Rice-Davies to his posh friends. Part of Ward's
bail was reportedly posted by young financier Claus von Bulow.
Talk about your dish! In 1963 English gossip columnists figured
they had died and gone to tabloid heaven. When these peccadilloes
hit the front pages, you couldn't tell the players without a Who's
Who and a Burke's Peerage. The scandal, a wild party held at the
sunset of imperial Britain, brought down Harold Macmillan's Tory
government and ushered in the era of Swinging London: the Beatles,
miniskirts, free love and pricey drugs.
Scandal is an express tour of the Profumo affair that moves
with a pop historian's revisionist swagger and plays like News of
the World headlines set to early '60s rock 'n' roll. Taking a cue
from Asquith's Pygmalion, the film casts Ward (John Hurt) as an
aristocratic makeover artist, discovering Keeler (Joanne
Whalley-Kilmer) in the fetid anonymity of a Soho strip club and
turning her into a star of the jet-set slumming circuit. Pluck your
eyebrows, Christine. Wet your lips. Come over and say hi to Jack
Profumo.
Stephen loves Christine, in his fashion. He pampers his girls
and introduces them to his randy friends because he likes being
liked. His sin is in assuming, like nearly everyone who jestered
near the thrones of power in Britain and America, that the games
could be pubic without ever going public. Enter Profumo (Ian
McKellen), who in his high-domed hairdo looks like a samurai of
probity. Jack is an indiscretion waiting to happen. He has so
little furtive pleasure to gain, and so much reputation to put at
risk, that his dalliance has the lurid fatalism of a soap opera.
Then Christine snitches to the press, and domestic melodrama stokes
national tragedy.
Scandal, whose producers had to snip a few naughty bits from
the Novotny orgy to avoid an X rating in the U.S., is wonderfully
performed by Hurt (pained irony), McKellen (droll reserve) and, as
Rice-Davies, Peter Fonda's daughter Bridget (comic acuity). The
film names names and gets the tone right. This is a morally
exhausted society, where every woman is a whore and every man a
pimp or a trick until proved otherwise. It has no hero or heroine,
only a victim: Stephen Ward, who loved trashy women and was
betrayed by distinguished men.