Three Good Films
SUMMER MANCEUVRES. (Academy.)---THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM. (Odeon.)--- THE DESPERATE Hoots. (Plaza.)
How lovely it is that the years have courte- ously neglected to lay their imprint upon Rend Clair. In Summer Matueuvres, which he has both written and directed, his eye is as fresh, his wit as delicate, his touch as felicitous as when he made, some twenty-five years ago, Sous les Toits de Paris. It is as though some kindly divinity had embalmed his magic for our perpetual delight. His• latest film is the bittersweet story of a lieutenant in the Dragoons, a Don Juan in a pre-First World War garrison town, Who makes a bet that he will seduce a certain lady by a certain date. and mistakenly falls in love with her. True love and a bad reputation are unhappy consorts, and our hero, played with devastating charm by Girard Philipe, is a sadder but wiser man when we leave him. Co-starring is Michele Morgan, also sad and wise and charming. Lapped in tenderness, very gentle and roman- tic, this rose-pink morality play has, to my mind, every light-weight virtue, every ephem- eral grace.
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Its two companions, jostling it at the top of the bill, are fiercely and uncompromisingly realistic. Otto Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm, another Loss Weekend, only set in a lower social stratum and with drugs as the protagonist, is a magnificent film. In that pro- foundly sad section of society peopled by professional gamblers, petty thieves, drunks and dissolutes Mr. Preminger measures the re- lapse of a so-called cured drug addict with a relentless and clinical accuracy. Frank Sinatra has never in his life given a better performance than as the man who sincerely means to keep away from the needle, but who, subconsciously, carries in him a seed of weakness which only a little adversity can cause to grow rampant. Touching our hearts he forces us to follow him through every stage of his fall, from self- assurance via fatigue, nervousness, craving and hysteria to the appalling physical agony he experiences when drugs are denied him. As the women in his life, Eleanor Parker, his neurotic crippled wife, and Kim Novak, who fights de- spairingly to save him, are wholly admirable. and the subsidiary parts are amply filled. Bril- liantly directed, this is a shattering, notable film.
The Desperate Hours, in which three escaped convicts park themselves in the house of an ordinary family for forty-eight hours and compel them through the hostage system to carry on their ordinary lives, is also a fine film. With Humphrey Bogart as the leading gangster and Frederic March as the head of the-house this study in suspense has been nerve-rackingly directed by William Wyler. Confined to two floors of a domestic interior he has furnished it with fear, carpeted it with hatred and vio- lence, so that it has an overpoweringly claustro- phobic effect. The excitement, coupled with a sort of blind rage and a vile taste in the mouth. lasts to the very end.
VIRGINIA GRAHAM
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