MOVIE REVIEW : ‘White Mischief’ Sets Small Fires but No Blazes

By rights, “White Mischief” (selected theaters) should have been a barn burner. It’s inspired by the infamous goings-on of a clot of British colonials living near Nairobi in the early 1940s, who played at sex, drugs, “rogering” each other’s wives and finally murder, while Mother England and the rest of the world went up in flames.

Instead, “White Mischief” is a giggle, or, at best, an exhausted yawn--one doesn’t quite giggle at the magnificent spectacle of Greta Scacchi, breasts unveiled or clingingly enveloped in gold lame. It would be like smirking at Winged Victory or stubbing out your cigarette on the Venus de Milo.

Yet for all of Scacchi’s indelible presence, it’s Sarah Miles as Alice de Janze, the film’s most grimly dedicated pleasure seeker, who catches the tone of the movie, possibly inadvertently. Accompanying herself on the ukulele, the morphine-addicted Alice sing-songs an alphabet song about life in the Happy Valley set, ending: “O is the outrage with nothing to gain, P is the pain.”

But pain, or wit, or a dark sense of lost souls are what have been routed out of James Fox’s book of the same title, a gripping story of decay among the aristos from which the film was very, very loosely derived. Alice’s song is heavy-handed and enervating, and so is the movie for all its steamy visuals. Even the central mystery of who indeed did shoot Josslyn Hay, the 22nd Earl of Erroll (Charles Dance), has been diluted.

The rakish earl was at the center of a tightly knit group of British wastrels who found themselves in Kenya in the late 1920s. Cut off from formalized society, some of them emigres by virtue of failure at home, they threw themselves into debauchery as though to deny their becalmed state. And Hay, an indefatigable and seemingly unrefusable chaser, was their leader. His judgment may have been suspect--in 1934 he’d joined the British Union of Fascists--but his charm, never.

By 1940, having married, divorced and dallied with all the “interesting” women whom Happy Valley could provide, he was ripe for the arrival of Diana Caldwell, the recent Lady Broughton, married two months to Jock Broughton (Joss Ackland), 30 years older than she. Taking no pains to hide their attraction, the earl and the lady began a flagrant affair.

With a gold-digger, a cad and an elderly, oyster-eyed fool as its eternal triangle, “White Mischief” cries out for a brisk bitchiness to its dialogue, a Gertrude Lawrence edge to its delivery. Or, at the very least, a little keen self-knowledge that might give a sense of tragic insight. Perhaps none was possible from this astonishing crew. In any case, director Michael Radford (“1984”) and his co-screenwriter Jonathan Gems decided--fatally--that decadence and languor were interchangeable qualities. As they attend to their orgies and cross-dressing parties, the handsome inhabitants posture and drawl banalities, without energy enough to spark a Girl Guide camp-out. And since we never know for certain whether these two handsome lovers were deceiving only her husband or themselves as well, it’s hard to sustain any sense of loss when Hay turns up with a bullet in his head.

Dance and Scacchi are a cool, beautiful pair--he is far better looking, in fact, than the notorious Lord Erroll, but they are deadly boring. Director Radford certainly provides a tactile sense of their attraction; Dance’s tanned hand on her bare back during their first dance is almost electric. But they need writing to bring them alive, and it fails them. Even among those who hated him, Lord Erroll was described as “ never dull” and here, for all of Dance’s urbanity, he is never anything but.

It’s a large, good and largely wasted cast: Geraldine Chaplin, Ray McAnally, Catherine Neilson (interesting as the fizzy blond), June Carberry and Trevor Howard in a last tragic glimpse. As the long-suffering husband, Ackland (“The Sicilian’s” rumbling-voiced Don) is especially strong. But it’s John Hurt whose character lingers: the mysterious, monosyllabic Gilbert Colvile, the British-born Kenyan cattle rancher who had, in the eyes of the Happy Valleyers, “gone native.” Attended constantly by two Masai warriors, Hurt alone is able to suggest the complexity that was absolutely present in this band of shadow-figures. (You have only to read the book to see how many layers have been shorn.)

Sarah Miles’ Alice, seen first wearing an enormous boa constrictor at a polo match, may have the most eyebrow-arching farewell scene in an R-rated film (for nudity, sex and such scenes as hers), but her smirking, insistent randyness is exactly what’s amiss with all of “White Mischief.”

‘WHITE MISCHIEF’

A Columbia Pictures, Nelson Entertainment and Goldcrest presentation of a Michael White/Umbrella Films production in association with Power Tower Investments (Kenya) and the BBC. Producer Simon Perry. Executive producer Michael White. Director Michael Radford. Screenplay Radford, Jonathan Gems, derived from the book by James Fox. Associate producer Simon Bosanquet. Camera Roger Deakins. Production design Roger Hall. Editor Tom Priestley, Music George Fenton. Costumes Marit Allen. Sound Tony Jackson. Art director Len Huntingford, set decorator Marianne Ford. With Greta Scacchi, Charles Dance, Joss Ackland, Sarah Miles, Geraldine Chaplin, Ray McAnally, Murray Head, John Hurt, Trevor Howard.

Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

MPAA-rated: R (under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian).