Cinema
and pulled out a plum
By ISABEL QUIGLY
torn thumb. (Empire.) — Bell, Book and Candle. (Plaza.)— One small child's opinion is worth that of fifty large critics on a film like torn thumb (director : George Pal; IP certificate), so I was lucky to find Sally, five-year-old daughter of one of my Colleagues, on the farthest edge of the seat in front of me at the press show. And most of it She loved, aghast with excitement or lolling back in exhausted delight; but the villains scared her into fits, whereas to a mere adult they—and the animated tops—are the best thing about it : Terry- Thomas, more outrageously gap-toothed than ever, and with the wickedest, slyest lot of nose- tapping you ever saw under a vast black hat, and Peter Sellers as one of his more rococo selves (one can hardly say impersonations), stuffed like a cumbrous bear into a great fur-collared over- coat and gazing out on the world with the only half-animate eye of the very, very stupid; three thoughts and four sentences each time behind his Wily accomplice. When Beardsley was at his height someone said that everywhere you were Pursued by Beardsley faces, and the same sort of thing, I find, is happening with Mr. Sellers: the man who comes to read the meter, the walrus- Moustached bus conductor, the spry youth slicing the bacon—all look like emanations of him, if that is the word for it, so chameleonly has he infiltrated our everyday imagination (at least Mine). Anyway, here he is, and tom thumb Would be worth a visit for a sight of him, if for nothing else.
But there is something else: animated toys dancing round the nursery floor when the grown-ups are out of sight, with a clockwork abandon that really seems to fit their material and mechanism : wooden toys dancing the way Wood would dance if it could, tin soldiers behav- ing as mobile tin soldiers would behave, furry, feathery and even plastic creatures all with a suitable and credible way Of bouncing and bump- ing : a repulsive rubber man moving in just the repulsive way you would expect rubber to move if -it came alive, and even the doyen of the nursery, a dignified Chinainan with a weight to hold him solid, doing a sort of pegged-down Version of a private and oriental-looking jive. Even a drawing jumps off the blackboard and dances alongside Tom (or torn), curling round Sideways to show how even a drawing has, if not quite three dimensions, at least two and a bit at such times. There are sonic pretty enough human dances as well, all Ivor Novello chorus clothes to a sound of a military band, but how can mere people fail to look tame beside a boy five inches tall and a chorus of stuffed rabbits?
The trouble with this film is torn. Five inches tall he may be, and his size is very well arranged to show the giganticness of spoons and steps and fingers : when he stands between the bars of a child-sized cot they look like the pillars of the British Museum portico, when he drops a coin in a basin of his mother's .dough it seems like some tank in a factory making dog-biscuits or shampoo; and normal-sized people look gro- tesquely inflated when he sits on their hat brims or shoots wildly out of the way of their pounding feet. But the trouble is (and it just illustrates that odd way the films have of disregarding the facts of age I mentioned last week) that this tom isn't a boy sent to comfort the childless woodcutter and his wife (Bernard Miles and Jessie Matthews), but, in the person of Russ Tamblyn, a young adult—an athletic youth made up to look boyish, but not even, in age and de- velopment, an adolescent, let alone a small boy to be rocked to sleep in a cot with lullabies and played with in a nursery full of toys. Every time Mr. Tamblyn's manly voice (the one undiminished thing about him) rang out one felt a sense of incongruity : and one felt rather more than in- congruity when he was lifted tenderly in his mother's enormous hands and admonished in the tone one uses to a child of six. For there is all the difference in the world (as Swift has shown better than anyone : and Gulliver kept coming to mind) between a child among his elders and a grown man among giants; and this torn, for all the accident of size, is a grown man, unable to behave convincingly as either an adult or a Fhild.
Richard Quine' is an amusing director, as opposed to a mere maker of amusing films: that is, he makes you smile with his direction, not just with his actors. His version of John van Druten's Bell, Book and Candle ('U' certificate), about a coven of New York witches leading outwardly respectable lives, is best at its most fantastic, and has some good moments when we see the witchery in action : the spell being woven, the man falling under it, the witch and her familiar, a Siamese cat, looking almost identical in a shimmer of blue, black and silver: An agreeable and gay evening, if you aren't feeling too exacting and can sit through some uninspired patches and a number of unwitty lines; with four players, any of whom it would be worth a visit for, even if the other three weren't there : Hermione Gingold and Elsa Lanchester, Jack Lemmon and Ernie Kovaks. James Stewart and Kim Novak are teamed to- gether far more successfully, I would say, than they were as the unlikely couple—or rather triangle—in Vertigo. Miss Novak makes a rather fetching witch, and Mr. Quine has managed to liven her acting and even her presence up sur- prisingly: though nothing has indicated yet that the girl has the smallest gleam of humour.
The Square Peg (director: John Paddy Car- stairs; 'LI' certificate): Norman Wisdom as a roadmender parachuted into German-occupied France to find the German general in charge there is his double. I am allergic to his usual roles, but liked his German general, and there is an unfor- gettable scene with Hattie Jacques, looking charmingly like everyone's notion of a German opera singer, where the pair of them sing duets and end up roped and gagged by the general's double.
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