WEDDING BREAKFAST. (EMpire.)-THE BABY
AND THE BATTLESHIP. (Warner.)-0H, LA-
LA, CHERI. (Berkeley.)-AWAY ALL BOATS.
(GaUMOIII.)---ANYTHING GOES. (Plaza.) BEING nosy, I like films about other people's domestic habits; but only when they look like People and not like actors trying to look like People. Ernest Borgnine (he who played Marty) is that rare bird in the cinema, an unmistakable person—which does not mean he is not an actor as well, but only that he has not acquired that cinematic patina that so often ends by making film actors appear quite distinct (not better or worse but different) from ordinary mortals. More exotically, this is also true of Bette Davis, and between the pair of them and Richard Brooks's direction, Gore Vidal's script (from a play by Paddy Chayefsky, who wrote Marty), and the acting of a beautifully suitable cast, Wedding Breakfast turns out a small and satisfying masterpiece.
Like Marty, the film penetrates the daily life of a poorish and almost closed community, in thi.; case the Bronx Irish, where Pa is a taxi- driver who has been saving for a lifetime to buy his own cab, Ma a squarish person who tries to compensate for an unromantic marriage by demanding romance from her daughter, and Jane, who is pretty and very young, is engaged (far too prosaically, in Ma's opinion) to a Spectacled young schoolmaster. When the pair decide to get married quietly, with only the family attending, Ma blows up. If Jane has not th..t right romantic instincts, they must be in- jected into her—there must be limousines, and a band, a wedding breakfast at five dollars a head, a vast satin album of photographs, bridesmaids, a matron-of-honour, the best hotel in town, a monster of a cake . . . before she finishes, it is clear Ma's plans will swallow up all Pa's $4,000, and with it his taxi, his ambi- tions, and his peace of mind. The solution, which I will not give away, is, though a shade abrupt, satisfactory both artistically and senti- mentally, and from Mr. Borgnine's Pa and Miss Davis's Ma down the acting is a delight. Debbie Reynolds is a pleasant surprise as Jane : deli- cate yet practical, a curiously adult adolescent, confident of her sterling love beside her mother's tinsel dreams of it, she strikes exactly the right contemporary note; and out of the blue in the small part of her best friend Alice comes a face I cannot remember seeing before but feel confident of seeing again : the name is Joan Camden, the personality quite unforget- table, and the performance (just a few moments confessing she cannot afford to buy a dress) extraordinarily moving. Miss Davis's accent, I must admit, had me foxed, having no connec- tion that I could hear with any part of Ireland that ever I came across; but her appalling and impressive emotional collapse towards the end, the neurotic girlish vision in her four-square body, her whole portrait of a class and outlook, had me fascinated; and the whole film struck me as being heart-warming without sentimen- tality, at once funny and persuasive, lyrical (at moments), yet refreshingly down-to-earth.
The Baby and the Battleship has one joke, which you can guess from the title—big tough sailors changing nappies and knitting socks for the stowaway infant aboard; with John Mills, Richard Attenborough, and a moderately amusing cast that left me, I must confess, un- amused. Director : Jay Lewis.
Oh, La-La. Cheri also has one sort of joke, which again you can guess from the title, and is even less amusing_ With Dany Robin and Daniel Gelin. Director : Gaspard-Huit.
Away All Boats, a fair to middling American battleship story of war in the Pacific, is raised from ttie humdrum by some brilliant fighting sequences in terrifying colour and close-up. Director : Joseph Pevney.
The old Bing Crosby musical Anything Goes is remade by Robert Lewis with some good Cole Porter tunes but an air—despite the en- chanting Ivleitzi Gaynor—of rather hollow jollity. Mr. Crosby goes through with it look- ing rather apprehensive, perhaps because the young woman the script assigns to him—the dancer Jeanmaire—reveals herself in mufti as curiously intimidating : with two of the most alarming rows of teeth I ever met with, she seems strictly, you would say, anthropo- phagous. ISABEL QU1GLY
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