Sappy? No, Absurd

One Way Pendulum. Summoned to the parlor of her modest London home, Mrs. Groomkirby finds that Mr. Groomkirby has transformed it into a replica of an Old Bailey courtroom. "I thought as much," she says bemusedly, then steps into the dock to testify in her son's trial for murder. He has slain 34--or perhaps 43--people by striking them down while they laughed at his jokes. Complaints have been lodged, the judge informs her. And drat it, the lad wears only black. Why?

Mrs. Groomkirby smiles patiently. "He always wore black as a baby."

The judge frowns. "Is your husband a Negro?"

"He is an insurance agent."

"Does he have any Negro blood?"

Mrs. Groomkirby shrugs. "He has two or three bottles up in his room, but he doesn't tell me what's in them."

Obviously the Groomkirby household is no ordinary one. This whole sappy movie may, in fact, be too extraordinary for its own good. Based on N. F. Simpson's London play and billed as England's jackknife dive into the Cinema of the Absurd, Pendulum shuns nearly every requisite for success. It shows little film sense, for its revue-style humor is more verbal than visual. It is often sophomoric, just as often wickedly funny, and has no plot whatever. To U.S. audiences its best-known players are Veteran Actress Mona Washbourne, as a pixilated aunt, and Writer-Actor Jonathan Miller (of Broadway's Beyond the Fringe), who poses as the maniacal son Kirby Groomkirby.

Homicide is only one of Kirby's quirks. Upstairs he conducts choir practice for a collection of speak-your-weight machines, reasoning that machines that talk ought to be able to sing a cappella. He also dotes on Pavlovian dogs, and his reflexes are conditioned accordingly. "Now he has to have a little ping every time he sets down to a meal," his mother complains, pinging.

Surprisingly, behind Pendulum's sometimes tidy, sometimes tiresome chaos, Writer Simpson has planted one or two ideas that swing. The Groom-kirbys, on the surface, behave like any middle-class family, and after a while their absurd rituals and lunatic discourse begin to seem alarmingly close to the norm. And as they blithely beat words to a pulp in their do-it-yourself Old Bailey, they somehow suggest that one way to solve the angst-ridden question of communication among men is to kill the language in self-defense.

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