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WATERLOO SUNSET’S FINE?

RETURN TO WATERLOO (New Line Cinema/RCA Video Productions)

by

Jon Young

Anyone familiar with vintage Kinks albums like Arthur, Preservation Acts I and II, and Soap Opera won’t be surprised that Ray Davies finally wrote and directed a film. The main Kink has been crossbreeding music and extended story lines since the late ’60s, when Arthur detailed the predicament of a working-class slob. In the earlyand mid-’70s, Kinks concerts based around Soap Opera and the Preservation LPs contained quasi-Broadway productions that fleshed out the songs in classic musical comedy fashion. Short of mounting a full-fledged stage show, Davies couldn’t have carried his ideas any farther in a live context.

The ambitious Return To Waterloo marks a logical progression, because film allows Davies more freedom. All you want to know, of course, is whether it’s worth your while. The answer: yes (Davies does what he set out to do) and no (it’s boring). A tightly constructed, intelligent hour of film, Return To Waterloo tells its story through music, with a minimum of incidental dialogue. Davies’s subject is The Traveller (Ken Colley), a morose, middle-aged businessman who’s seen in the act of traveling between London and suburban Waterloo Station. (See “Waterloo Sunset” for a happier evocation of the same location.) As the train rumbles along, he reflects on his unhappy circumstances. Seems the poor guy’s trapped in a boring life, much like the lessaware “Well Respected Man.” We learn that The Traveller is alienated from his wife (Valerie Holliman) and harbors unclean feelings toward his own daughter (Dominique Barnes). The people he encounters during the ride, from office workers to punks, trigger musical fantasies that intensify his feelings of helpless depression. And that’s nearly the sum total of Waterloo.

The film is an effective one-note character study, but a good oldfashioned plot would have added another dimension. Unless you’re a Kink kultist, monotony sets in early on. Like Davies intended, apparently—in a press release, he says, “The train is a metaphor for an internal journey. The Traveller is a man going through a crisis, wrestling with life’s decisions. Just as he has to take the same train every day, he is unable to break out of his rut. My intention was to make people think, to draw their own conclusions.”

Fine and dandy. Unfortunately, there’s little in Return To Waterloo that Davies hasn’t already done on record. An hour of some screwedup guy’s confused musings doesn’t tell me a heck of a lot—I can be depressed on my own without Ray’s help. Gimme something to get involved in besides gloom. Maybe Ray should’ve gotten Chuck Norris to play The Traveller...added a subplot about drug-smugglers ...now that’s entertainment!

Anyway, the suspense angle of Waterloo is the film’s most compelling facet. There’s a rapist loose and the police description says he looks just like The Traveller. Walking through the station, our protagonist begins trailing an attractive woman who looks vaguely like his own daughter. So is he the bad guy or not? That’s not the point, you knucklehead! This is Art.

Kudos to Ken Colley, whose weary face perfectly captures the resignation and spiritual exhaustion of The Traveller. Bravo, too, to Davies’s music, which comes in part from the recent Word Of Mouth. The newer material deserves to be on disc as well; some of it’s simply gorgeous. Davies himself makes a cameo appearance as a scuzzy busker in the station, and his brief appearance packs more punch than everything else put together.

One technical note: Avoid the theatrical showing of Return To Waterloo. Obviously intended for TV—the length alone says that— the film seems grainy and washedout on a bigger screen. Catch it on home video for maximum effect.

HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO ADAMS

by

Karen Schlosberg

The Hitchhiker Trilogy consists of four books: The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy; The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe; Life, The Universe And Everything, and So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish. Hitchhiker—the book— was preceded by Hitchhiker the radio series and record; followed by Hitchhiker the TV series and Hitchhiker the interactive computer software game, and will also be represented by Hitchhiker the soon-to-be major motion picture.

Needless to say, the British series has become extremely popular, both at home and abroad, in the seven years since the BBC radio shows first hit the airwaves. Hitchhiker contains everything from the sublime to the ridiculous. It’s a delicious mix of intelligence, sarcasm, wit, surrealism and irreverence—the sort of quintessential British silliness that can only be produced, apparently, by a highly educated person. It scores high marks, too, for deflating both digital watches and organized religion within the same introductory paragraph.

See also Arthur Dent.

Dent, Arthur. Confused Earthman who wanders throughout the known Universe with his alien friend, HH Guide field researcher Ford Prefect, looking for, among other things, a decent cup of tea. He and Ford become entangled with several nasty bug-eyed monsters (some green), a twoheaded egomaniacal ex-Galactic President, white mice, dolphins and robots (particularly a morose one named Marvin, the microchipped metallic counterpart to E.E. Milne’s donkey Eeyore in Winnie the Pooh), but finds true love and God’s Final Message to His Creation at the end.

See also Douglas Adams.

Adams, Douglas. 33-year-old, Cambridge-educated writer; amiable, voluble and quick-witted, with a highly polished sense of the absurd.

Adams works out of his flat in north London. A self-professed hater of writing (“It’s sort of like a bad bout of psychotherapy, and I saw this not actually having been in it, but I have seen Woody Allen films”), he nonetheless seems to be constantly working. At the time of this field researcher’s first attempt to pry the Ultimate Answer to Creativity from him, for example, he was working not only on one of the many versions of the Hitchhiker screenplay, but the interactive game and the fourth book as well—which he had once said he wasn’t going to write.

“Well, largely what prompted me was the fact that I really wanted to do the bit of God’s Final Message to His Creation,” Adams says now, almost apologetically, “which was an idea I had knocking around and I hadn’t been able to incorporate so far. It kind of bugged me that I hadn’t been able to use it, because there was nowhere else I could use it other than in Hitchhiker. So I thought, ‘Oh damn, I’d better do it.’

“I would be disappointed if the major thing in my life was what I did in my 20s,” Adams continues. “I would like to feel that that got me off to a terrifically good start, but then all kinds of good things followed. I’m determined that that should be the case.”

In the near future Adams will be busy with more software projects (“...not all games. One thing we definitely will be doing is another Hitchhiker game, but I don’t want that to be the next one”), a new and entirely different book and, of course, Hitchhiker—the movie— which, he says, “has been a bit of a trial. I think one of the hallmarks of Hitchhiker is, if I could say this, a slightly rambling aspect. It’s very, very difficult to force it into the sort of shape a movie demands.

“I have consultation rights, which is a way of saying you’ve got control without actually giving it to you. They can’t do anything to the story without asking me—unless they want to,” Adams says, and laughs.

See also Ultimate Answer to Creativity.

Adams has tended to listen to music “obsessively” while writing, “to create an intensity that you feed off.” Dire Straits’ song “Tunnel of Love” provided the atmosphere for So Long...-, Paul Simon’s LP One Trick Pony for Restaurant...-, and, interestingly enough, Procol Harum’s song “Grand Hotel” for Hitchhiker (the song was actually the inspiration for Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe). But where, disciples want to know, does he get his ideas?

“I think the last bunch of letters that asked me about that I said I got most of my ideas from a mail order company in Ohio.”