White Mischief.

White Mischief

A MORE ADULT form of bygone amorality is purportedly recreated in White Mischief, about the dirty doings among the rich and idle British colonists in Kenya's Happy Valley, while their compatriots back in blitz-riddled Britain kept desperately extinguishing the home fires the Luftwaffe was showering on them. Here, however, a bunch of wealthy landowners, many of them black sheep of aristocratic families, play while their black servants work. The favorite games, aside from sports, are orgies, dope and drink, adultery, and shooting--whether game, pineapples set up by native retainers who very nearly become targets themselves, or the occasional spouse or spouse's lover seems to matter only marginally.

The climate event is the still officially unsolved murder on January 24, 1941, of Josslyn Hay, 39, 22nd Earl of Erroll, found gunned down at night in his car not far from the estate of Sir Henry John (Jock) Delves Broughton, 52, whose 27-year-old wife, Diana, a gorgeous adventuress who had only recently married him for his money, was planning to elope with the penniless but irresistible earl, apparently the first man she had given rather than sold herself to. Jock Broughton, who was arrested for the murder, was cleared by a jury of his peers from the peerage--that was the way of British Africa; the reportedly fine book about the case, White Mischief by James Fox, does not purport to solve it. The film, based too loosely or not loosely enough on the book, hints broadly by various melodramatic means, but even so remains confused, flimsy, and enervating. Since every woman and her brother in Kenya got somehow involved with Josslyn, everybody gets a chance to act suspiciously and weirdly; but since all the characters are just creepy or pitiful bundles of attitudes, their innocence or guilt, like everything else about them, remains a matter of perfect indifference.

The film's selling point is manifestly decadence, but Michael Radford, who directed and, with Jonathan Gems, wrote the script, hasn't a clue to how to go about selling it. Most of his colonists are too physically unappetizing to make their stagy carryings-on seem sexy; on the other hand, the writing and directing are too clumsy to make the orgying satirical and amusing in sufficient degree. It all comes out jaded and stultifying, which may be what it was for the participants (though much of it struck me as unbelievable), but why should we be subjected to it at length?

That leaves the central triangle in which Jock (Joss Ackland) acts either arrogant or objects, Josslyn (Charles Dance) comes across far too sleazy and colorless to be a great seducer even in Kenya, and Diana (Greta Scacchi) is beautiful in a cold, disembodied way, and takes her clothes off like clockwork. But the sex scenes--even the passionate ones, never mind the passionless--are directed, too, with the mechanistic precision of a piece of clockwork, and emerge as exciting as a life class in art school. And there are not even enough scenic views of Africa to make the film rewarding as a travelogue. George Fenton's period music, however, and some of the clothes do have the right spirit.

There are two performances worth noting. Joss Ackland, an excellent actor, manages to infuse genuine, understated feeling into the role of Jock whenever the writing or directing doesn't get in the way. And Trevor Howard makes his last appearance here as a loyal but warped old friend of Jock's, a decrepit landowner who indulges in voyeuristic practices. It is not a glorious way for his great actor to have gone out, and he looks sick in (and perhaps also of) the part, but you can still sadly watch him give it his tired, gallant best. Trevor Howard was one of the cinema's supreme artists.