A Touch of Class

By JAY COCKS

BUTLEY Directed by HAROLD PINTER Screenplay by SIMON GRAY Ben Butley, who teaches English literature at a London university, is generally befogged and intermittently besieged. An arch ex-wife seeks him out with the news that she plans to remarry. Students descend on him for tutorials, inundate him with papers like "Hate and Redemption in A Winter's Tale. "Edna Shaft (Jessica Tandy) is upset because Butley(Alan Bates) encouraged a student to quit one of her stifling seminars. Joey Keyston (Richard O'Callaghan), a junior member of the department, is planning to move in with his lover, Reg, whom Butley disdains. This news stirs not only jealousy but whole psychic subcurrents of his own unresolved homosexuality. Butley counterattacks this battalion of woes with great sardonic war whoops, trying to beat back misery with salvos of bitter jokes.

The trouble with this movie, as with Simon Gray's original play, is that Butley's abrasive quips remain an impregnable line of defense. His manic sense of humor is the means he uses to make things matter not quite so much. His jokes stop him short of anything really serious, and they stop the movie as well.

Gray's dialogue has a graceful bite, but it does not have the edge of desperation that would have given it depth. Butley's life ravels like the end of his shirtsleeve; it conies undone in the single day we watch him. But Gray is less successful at evoking anxiety than in getting down the sort of dizzy, antic quality of academic life.

Alan Bates makes a fine, fleet Butley. "Oh, if only they'd get on with it and let us teach!" he moans as he invokes the weight of spurious administrative duties to dodge yet another tutorial. He never allows the irony to become too heavy at moments like that; he always keeps quite the proper balance, making the ruse believable but also hypocritically funny. He is also a master of the throwaway and can brush off a fast line like a piece of dandruff off his rumpled suit. Confronted with a thick M.A. thesis entitled "Henry James and the Crucified Consciousness," he examines it quickly, notes that it is laid out "like a film scenario," and tosses it aside with the assurance that the author "must be an American." Bates is also able to supply some shading that the writing lacks. His face, as the film ends, begins to show the first traces of brutal emptiness and panic, as if he had been subjected to the kind of beating that leaves no scars.

Playwright Harold Pinter also directed the original London production of Butley, and this version--another in the American Film Theater's erratic but encouraging series--represents Pinter's first movie. The action occurs almost entirely inside Butley's office, which looks like some sort of chaotic command bunker, and it is greatly to Pinter's credit that he makes the physical constriction of the play work for the movie. Butley seems all the more locked in here, clearly at bay. As might well be expected of Pinter, the pace of the piece is finely measured and orchestrated with musical precision. The actors (all excellent) have been admirably tutored in the parlor arts of undertone, implicit insult and glancing innuendo. Considering Harold Pinter as a fledgling film maker is a piquant reversal--the master of one form becomes a novice at another--but it must be said that Butley is a quite superior directorial debut. "Jay Cocks

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