Cinema: I'll Never Forget What's 'Isname

Furiously swinging an ax, the London adman whacks his desk into sawdust. "Andrew, darling," soothes the boss, "you're always threatening to resign." Andrew darling's hackwork is nothing compared with what Producer-Director Michael Winner (The Jokers) has done to this splintery British satire on the high cost of selling out.

Having demolished his desk, the rebellious adman this time really does cut loose. Determined to go straight, Andrew (Oliver Reed) leaves the business, the boss, and the ball-and-chain. To further prove his good intentions, he even jettisons his two mistresses. Soon he gets an honest job at the Gadfly, a drab little literary magazine, where his principal duty is rejecting manuscripts. The rest of the time he accepts the adoration of a puddingy secretary (Carol White) who finds him as irresistible as he obviously finds himself.

The boss, played by Orson Welles, wants him back. Eventually Welles, whose acting is confined to grinning like a corrupt Buddha, removes the Gadfly's sting by acquiring its assets and offices. Undone, Andrew makes one more commercial, this one about Truth. The night of a banquet for the Creativity in Advertising awards, he unreels it—a naive diatribe against planned obsolescence that includes footage of a bulldozer shoveling bodies at Buchenwald and an atomic mushroom cloud rising while a little girl sings All Things Bright and Beautiful.

Manifestly, Winner believed that throughout the film he was courageously exposing the underside of affluence. Actually, What's 'Isname simply knocks tired old targets in a weary new way, with a kind of tasteless, toothless satire that gums where it should bite.

In a mock defense of the ad game, Welles proposes that "the main product in the 20th century is waste" and predicts that in 200 years the world will be standing on a huge mound of garbage. Possibly. And close to the bottom will be this story of a Fake's Progress that is as false as an £8 note.