20 DECEMBER 1957, Page 20

No Sea Change

Barnacle Bill. (Empire.)—Danger- ous Exile. (Odeon, Leicester Square.) — The Sad Sack. (Odeon, Marble Arch.)

Barnacle Bill is, to be frank, a big flop, but it is rather hard to see why. On paper is sounds fine (a T. E. B. Clarke script, an Alec Guinness performance, Charles Frend's direction), a comedy in the old Ealing manner with the very best of the old ingredients. Add an amusing idea to start off with (old sea dog who gets seasick every time he so much as looks at a wave), and it sounds like having everything. Per- haps that is really the trouble—stuffed pains- takingly in it is pretty well everything that went well in past comedies of the kind. Remember Alec Guinness playing seven cousins in Kind Hearts and Coronets?—it seems to be saying, with an outsize nudge in the ribs. Well, here he is again, as all six of his naval ancestors and the modern hero. Remember the Gothick cars and boats and trains that proved such a fertile source of senti- ment and fun in the old days? Well, here's a Victorian pier, all wrought-iron curlicues and livened by such contemporary additions as teen- agers and rock 'no roll. Remember how a bit of Pimlico turned into foreign territory? Well, turn the pier into a ship, register it at Lloyds, cut the few planks that join it to the mainland and treat it as if it's afloat ! The possibilities are endless but the heart—or something, call it what you like— seems to have gone out of it. Alec Guinness is impeccable, but even he seems to lack the warmth that would make us care. But it is worth seeing for a sight of him rocking 'n' rolling, as exquisite a bit of staid fooling as we have had since A King in New York.

Dangerous Exile takes us straight back to the old Gainsborough days of wicked ladies and men in grey, being historical nonsense plushly pre- sented, with handsome scenery, elaborate cos- tumes, a race-and-rescue ending like that of a routine Western involving some strapping main players and rollicking fun for the extras, a pinch of sadism and rather more than a pinch of décolletage. Based on a novel by that ingenious solver of historical puzzles, Vaughan Wilkins, it sets out to tell us what happened to the little boy in the Temple, Louis XVII, who was pursued, it appears, by spies and enemies of all sizes and shapes from Keith Michell to Finlay Currie, and rescued, with the help of a balloon and a priest's hiding hole, by Louis Jourdan and Belinda Lee, Redeemed by the beautiful shots of dawn and night-time on long stretches of beach; and by Martita Hunt as an autocratic bedridden old lady about three sizes too large for her surroundings. Director : Brian Desmond Hurst.

The Sad Sack stars Jerry Lewis, of whom one has nightmarish memories in partnership with Dean Martin, but who is now on his own and very much improved by it. With the sorrowful blood- hound face of a younger, handsomer Fernandel, he gave this rather limp film about the dim-witted private a certain comic point. Director : George Marshall.

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