FILM: Darlings, you weren't wonderful

YOU are a distinguished British actor, outraged and disheartened by the tide of mockery that now threatens to engulf your craft. You feel that your once proud profession has been traduced by a media that represents it as trivial, pretentious and self-indulgent. If they use that term "luvvy" again, you'll scream! It may be that your career has been clouded by your actorly image. What should you do next? Well, if you're Kenneth Branagh, whose views on the esteem in which actors are now held may not be far away from the above, you make In the Bleak Midwinter (15) - a film which confirms every stereotype you're supposed to be so keen to abolish.

In the Bleak Midwinter is about a troupe of lowly actors putting on a production of Hamlet in a country church. It's part of a tradition that goes back to the rude mechanicals in A Midsummer's Night Dream, so maybe it's appropriate that the humour is familiar to the point of hoariness. Michael Maloney plays the out-of-work actor, falling back on his Dane- mania. His motley cast includes: grumpy Irving idolater Richard Briers; flouncy drama queen John Sessions; arty know-all Nick Farrell; myopic love interest Julia Sawalha; and closet alcoholic Gerard Horan. You can work out the gags yourself - the queen plays the Queen, the shortsighted Ophelia trips over the set, a smoke-machine billows out of control ... Until the players begin to find that the play speaks to them; life resembles art, and all that. The movie resembles last month's low-budget-film-within- a-low-budget-film, Living in Oblivion. This theatrical version might have been called Luvvying in Oblivion.

Comedy is a rum business, one man's merriment being another's poison. I know of people who find In the Bleak Midwinter funny, even uproarious. But I can't see it myself. A glimmer of amusement played across my features, when Joan Collins, Maloney's thrusting agent, mistakes the name of the bedraggled designer, Fadge (Celia Imrie), and calls her Snatch. But it didn't resolve itself into a smile, still less a laugh. The jokes are stale: the rapid cross-cutting between abysmal auditions - ludicrous tap- dancer, Olivier plagiarist, pontificater on Bosnia - was seen to much better effect in Living in Oblivion, which itself travestied Broadway Danny Rose. The jokes are also too crudely delivered. Good gags creep up and take you unawares. Branagh's hail you from across the street.

It is all a great shame. Anybody who saw Branagh on stage as Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing will know he is one of the wittiest of modern actors. He is a natural comedian, and yet he has made an unnaturally laboured comedy, which makes his previous effort in the genre, Peter's Friends, seem like Renoir. The comic groping also obscures the potentially poignant theme of the film - the idea of the theatre as a family, a haven for the waifs and strays of the world. After the extravagant failure of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Branagh has gone for a low-budget black-and- white look. But he has eschewed experiment for functionality. His camera- work is competent, but occasionally, by sticking to long-shots, he misses the comic detail of his actors' performances.

The piece is not without charm. Gerard Horan's Carnforth Greville, a broad-bottomed mediocrity who spends his time filling in crosswords regardless of the clues and getting steadily drunk, has a wry ring of thespian truth. Perhaps it was out of recognition that the actors who filled the cinema where I saw the film laughed so much. But with hollow guffaws all around me, I had the odd sensation of witnessing a better performance in the stalls than on the screen. Darlings, you were marvellous.

"He was the only man I've known who gave more than he asked for," recalls lawyer Christian Slater at the end of Murder in the First (15), speaking of the client (Kevin Bacon) he has just defended. "All that he ever wanted was a friend." Stirring words - it's only a pity they don't bear much relation to the Bacon we meet in the film. Like many things in this muddled prison-cum-courtroom-drama, the speech is more for effect than sense. Marc Rocco's direction constantly distracts us with slow motion, while failing to get right important details - like making newsreel of the period appear fa- ded. Christopher Young's lushly emotional score rises to such a pitch of feeling during the opening credits that you feel like crying before the movie has started.

Murder in the First is based on a true story (a fact the movie doesn't make enough of), of a man (Bacon) kept for three years in unspeakable conditions of solitary confinement - a dark dungeon known as "the hole" - in the Alcatraz of the 1930s. Such bestial treatment reduces Bacon to a virtual animal: a gibbering, shag-haired wreck, he crouches in corners and crawls, like a monkey, over the floor. When he is allowed into the canteen, he murders another inmate, using a spoon for a dagger. Slater's earnest young lawyer seeks to get Bacon off with a manslaughter charge instead of the first-degree murder for which he faces execution - on the grounds of diminished responsibility due to the inhumanity of his imprisonment. Alcatraz, and its sadistic deputy warden (a full-blast Gary Oldman), end up in the dock as much as Bacon.

The O J Simpson trial has raised our expectations of courtroom drama. The legal section of Murder in the First skimps on detail and is messily expounded - typical of Dan Gordon's script, which gets hold of interesting themes (the prisoner's yearning for freedom, the dehumanising nature of punishment, the role of luck and environment in our fates) without ever developing them. Slater's lawyer begins and ends the film with dictionary definitions - of "rehabilitation" and of "victory" - which may be a way of pointing up his nerdiness, but also makes for a ploddingly unresonant peroration. Neither as shocking as Midnight Express nor as moving as The Shawshank Redemption, the movie, like most Alcatraz pictures, misses its opportunities. No film has caught the fascination and horror of the place as well as Alistair Cooke's 1959 radio Letter From America, which described the the prisoners glimpsing the city "only for a few taunting seconds every day".

Unlike last year's flop re-make of Miracle on 34th Street, The Santa Clause (U) gives a modern spin to Santa. Tim Allen plays a middle-aged toy manufacturer, who, having taken custody of his son from his estranged wife for Christmas Eve, knocks out Father Christmas, and ends up having to do the delivery duties. As the next yuletide approaches, a certain thickening of the jowls, bulging of the stomach, and sprouting of a luxuriant grey beard, suggest to Allen that the role may not have been a one-off. The police, missing the festive spirit, chase Allen for abducting his child. A usually sprightly variation on the old theme of childish fantasy outshining adult realism, the film is seasoned with gorgeous special effects (the sledge and reindeer careering through the sky above Manhattan) and topical gags, such as a politically correct teacher admonishing: "We don't say 'elves' - they're 'little people'."

Female delinquency is the theme of two erratic features set in France. The pop star Vanessa Paradis plays a Parisian waif avenging her mother's suicide through anti-social behaviour in Jean Becker's Elisa (15). Her petty thieving, prostitution and viciousness are unduly romanticised, as if the director wants us to take them as noble rather than tiresome. The movie is lurid and melodramatic, with a late cameo appearance by Gerard Depardieu, but also often strange and disconcerting.

Nancy Meckler's Sister My Sister (15) is based on a horrific true crime in a provincial French house of the 1930s. Joely Richardson and Jodhi May play incestuously close sisters, who work as maids to a repressive bourgeoise (an against-type Julie Walters) and her daughter. The servants are as tightly wound-up as their scraped-back hair, and the final bloodshed comes with sickening inevitability. Over-designed and undernourished, the movie is a little too pallid for the big screen.

Cinema details: Review, page 92.