Cinema
Sundae's Child
By ISABEL QUIGLY
The Five Pennies. (Plaza.)—The Wonderful Country. (London Pavilion.) DANNY KAYE'S charm is sonic- . : thing I have to take other people's word for. They assure me it exists. To me he seems a very clever maker of noises, a mimic with enough dexterity of the larynx to out- quack, out-hiss, out-neigh, out-roar or outdo any duck, goose, horse, lion or other natural noise in the universe, besides outsmarting any man-made noise like (say) a washing machine going into action or an orchestra playing Berlioz backwards. And that's all. Not a charmer, not a great or eve R a very good comedian, not a wringer of withers or a clown in the category (or even the sense) of Chaplin or Toth or Fernandel; his ob- vious limitation being that while he can arouse laughter of an intellectual and admiring kind (repeat : intellectual, for all his popularity), and a sort of awestruck whistle at the skill with which he does it, he is defeated when it comes to feeling: sentiment becomes sentimentality. All of which just means that I prefer to see him in noisy action as something he isn't, rather than in his straight role of universal favourite.
The Five Pennies (director : Melville Shavel- son; 'Li' certificate), the story of the cornet player Red Nichols, is such a mixture of his two selves and of the makers' confusion of mind about them that you must sit through a good deal of the one if you want to see the other : and well worth the effort it is. Because for some marvellous moments you have Danny Kaye doing what he seems to have been put on earth for : making uninhibited nonsense of everyday noises and taking the musi- cal mickey out of anything that comes to hand. And there is Louis Armstrong with him, who, as anyone who saw his film biography will re- member, is a film 'natural,' someone who seems formed, as a personality, to come across to a cinema audience without any apparent effort at Projection or sympathy, like Hayley Mills or the MGM lion; and whose air of improvisation, as if he had just strolled in before the cameras, goes Well with what is in fact his (and Danny Kaye's) split-second timing: an assurance far beyond social ease, the assurance of pre-eminence. They play what I suppose is Red Nichols's arrangement 01 the Battle Hymn of the Republic together; they sing a riotous (yet moving) new version of 'When the saints come marching in'; and anyone (if there is still anyone) who shuts his ears to jazz (all jazz qua jazz, jazz-on-principle) ought to listen to the pair of them at it, as a kind of ear-opener, of the most salutary and cheering sort. At the press show, that chill occasion, they raised that most Illogical of audience reactions in the cinema, applause; at a warmer gathering they look likely to bring the roof down.
These are the high spots. The film is as uneven as it is (for their sake) worth seeing. The story, Which is said to be true, more or less (and just Proves once again the unsuitability of fact for Purposes of fiction), is so corny that it seems odd it ever finds space for them, or, for that matter, for its early neat satire on various excruciatingly familiar styles of popular performance, or for Barbara - Bel Geddes, the nicest actress in the World, in the best sense of that rather limited Word, who manages to be as cosy as a tea-cake While steering instinctively clear of corn. There are some awful moments between Mr. Kaye and his film daughter, whom he pampers and snarls at, depending on his mood, and packs off to a boarding school at the age of five (a rather more Murderous-looking action in America than here). Where she gets polio in a crisis of homesickness on Christmas Day; after which, suicidal with remorse, he drops his cornet in the sea, takes a Job as a labourer and devotes the next ten years to teaching the child to walk. The end is Holly- Wood sundae : cream on jam on nuts on cake on More cream : tears, triumph, come-back, kisses and hugs all round (though not, I noticed, for Mr. Armstrong) and lumps in the throat as big as eggs. Never mind, there are plenty of unlutupy compensations; and Danny Kaye, back at his Chameleon tricks again, as a mounty, an Eskimo, a Hawaiian, a Cossack, a ploughboy from Utah With a straw between his teeth, or simply the Parrish; 'LI' certificate) is, of course, the United Way all the neighbouring children howled when he was a boy, is the chief of them.
States; and this is a confusing south-of-the- border Western about an American turned The Wonderful Country (director : to Robert Mexican for profit and his subsequent moil!, as Well as physical and mental, homesickness. In its presumption that everything north of the border must be better than everything south, the film is mildly laughable; but it has some good things about it : Julie London as the heroine with a reputation to match her full, asymmetrical face; Pedro Armendariz as the Mexican bandit- politician whose chattel (legally murderable if he becomes a nuisance) Robert Mitchum, black- bearded and oddly spoken, has become. Mr. Mitchum seems to enjoy caricaturing his past roles under the biggest sombrero, the heaviest eyelids and the grubbiest make-up in the busi- ness; so that one tends to forget—it seems so far removed—that, given the script, direction and opportunity, he can act. Much local colour—a fight with Apaches, a Mexican feast, all skulls and fireworks; much muttered, multi-accented dialogue; a rather more direct approach to sex than the Western conventions generally allow; and a horse called Ltigrimas—Tears—clearly de- signed to show the un-Americanness of Mexico, even in the matter of horses.
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