Mixed Bunch
WESTERN, musical, thriller, and potted musical biography—the week's films, all from Holly- wood, all in colour, are as representative a bunch as you could wish.
To begin at the bottom: if I get more laughs out of any film this year than I got out of Magic Fire, or 'The Life and Loves of Richard Wagner,' I shall cat my critical hat. 'Richard Wagner.' the publicity folder told us, 'one of the truly greats of the world of music,' has been a long time coming to the screen. Now he has come, it is in the person of a small and perpetually outraged-looking young man (Alan Badel), with a curious, because I think quite involuntary, talent for the ludicrous. Everything he touches becomes faintly comic; cannot quite tell why. He flounces (perhaps Wagner did); he gobbles with rage (perhaps Wagner did too); he shows the whites of his eyes, and a not un-Wagnerian profile under a bush of hair and a Rembrandt cap; but, so hampered is he by that clown, his alter ego, that never for one moment is he able to show the form, or even the shadow, of genius. To he fair to him, the script doesn't help, being sillier than you would think three grown people could make it; nor does William Dieterle's direction, which, while having tremendous high jinks with the novelettish side (and there was plenty) of Wagner's life, seems totally to ignore the point the script in one place tries to make—that an artist must be judged by his works. The women are the best thing about it —Valentina Cortese, looking dowdy but beautiful in the oddest blonde wig, gives dis- tinction to Mathilde Wesendonk, and an inter- esting Cosima von Billow, with a nervous, asymmetrical, thoroughbred face, comes from Rita Gam.
A Kiss Before Dying is stylish, mannered and exciting: a thriller of some distinction. Based on a novel by Ira Levin, it is about that psychological favourite, the good-looking upstanding youth who might have come straight out of Scouting for Boys, and on the quiet takes to murder. Such simple, polite murders, too: nothing messy—just a shove as he kisses his girl on a skyscraper roof, or a suicide calmly faked in a crowded corridor.
Robert Wagner plays Bud, the undergraduate, with just the right degree of innocence—wide- eyed, moody, hair over his eyes—to make you believe he would kill a girl rather than walk out on her, and a furry-headed blonde called Joanne Woodward makes just the clinging, cosy, faintly stupid victim that would attract such a man in the first place and drive him desperate in the second. Director: Gerd Oswald.
'Carousel, the Rodgers and Hammerstein stage show about the erring husband let down from heaven for a day to sec how his family has been doing since he died, has been brought without much change to the screen (in Cinema- Scope 55, that most panoramic measure of them all) and is pretty, high-coloured, ear- splitting, corny and enormous fun. Spirits high enough to infect the audience are what a musical really needs (apart, of course, from good tunes), and myself I found the frenzy of 'June is bustin' out all over' or the snug firelit nostalgia of 'A real nice clambake' immensely infectious. There were some interesting faces, too, that looked as if they had strayed on to the screen by mistake, so unexpected was it to find them there—chiefly those of Susan Luckey, a tremulous pale waif who plays the orphan, and of Shirley Jones, who gives the heroine a face as wholesome and round as a polished pippin. Director: Henry King.
ISABEL QUIOLY
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