Cinema
Family Brick
By ISABEL QU1GLY
Bon Voyage. (Studio One.) —Jessica. (Odeon, Marble Arch.) WEEKS of spate alternate with weeks of drought. This, in the cinema, is a week of trickle. Bon Voyage, for instance, its best friends wouldn't call im- portant. Whether you take to it really depends on whether you take to the Disney style of family comedy, and in particular to the Disney actors. Like a small rep., Disney's group of actors, turning up in film after film (with addi- tions or subtractions each time, presumably when one or two have measles), seems either repetitive or friendly. If you have seen The Absent-Minded Professor, Pollyanna or The Swiss Family Robinson you will greet most of these faces with glee or groans, depending. Myself, I think Disney does well with his older generation (Jane Wyman and Fred MacMurray in this case, as in others) and with his youngest (Kevin Corcoran in prac- tically everything, a stout charmer), but I don't in the least take to his intermediate generation, his young persons, which throws out the film's balance, as far as charm and I are concerned.
Anyway Bon Voyage certificate), within its formula, is a pleasant little romp about the predictable excitements of a family holiday, here the holiday-of-a-lifetime, planned for and dreamed about for twenty-two years in the Middle West—a trip to Paris. Pop is a pros- perous plumber and Momma comes from Boston (so5ial jokes), there are two teenage siblings to provide romance and an amiable smaller one with a nice line in laconic world-weariness. The jokes are so predictable you almost clap them as they come on, but it's all done with charm, if not deftness, and, though it's easy to sneer at wholesomeness written quite as large as this, Disney does provide the few films you can take anything between eight and eighty to without checking up beforehand on sadism, sex and the rest—which, on wet afternoons, half-terms and aunts' birthdays, can be useful. This may not be the Higher Criticism, but nor is Bon Voyage the Higher Film-making Useful, charming, wholesome are not words I would apply to Jessica ('A' certificate), Jean Negulesco's latest and perhaps most dreadful effort to bring the sunny south to the rest of us. (He made Three Coins in the Fountain, to bring us Rome; Boy on a Dolphin, ditto the Greek islands; and, in a lurid version of Nancy Mit- ford's The Blessing, called Noblesse Oblige, ditto Paris.) Negulesco is the original vulgarian, the man who paints the coloured postcards brighter; and this time, in a modern version of the Lysistrata taken from a French novel in which the village women refuse their husbands so as to put the pretty midwife out of business, he has gone to Sicily, and made the midwife an American widow (Angie Dickinson), and the local priest, who has coy, Don Camillo-ish chats with God, none other than Maurice Chevalier. Negulesco's sheer effrontery in the use of scenery, sunsets, sob-stuff and, above all, local colour must be seen to be believed. If he made a film here he'd have morris dancers at every second street-corner and beefeaters, veteran cars and Chelsea pensioners at the ones in between. Jessica has all the Sicilian equivalents he can possibly squeeze in and strikes me as being vaguely insulting, if that isn't inflating it too much, to the entire human race.
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