On Screen

...On SCREEN By William Murray Kramer's Pride/ Lancaster's Success' Despite its absurd title, Stanley Kramer's The Pride and the Passion seems to me just about the best kind of movie Hollywood can turn out...

...In this film, the real love object is the huge cannon, and I guess, on the whole, it's probably a pretty good thing Miss Loren is around...

...The movie shows you what happens as a Spanish guerrilla and a British sea captain of the Hornblower variety, who also happens to be a gunnery expert, team up to lug the cannon across two hundred difficult miles until it is at last trained on the French garrison in Avila...

...For my own part, I'm glad he has at last put his not inconsiderable talents to the service of entertainment, a field from which even good showmanship is too often lacking, and left art to Cayatte, Welles, Ros-sellini and that handful of other real artists who are capable occasionally of making an uncompromising motion picture...

...And Alexander Macken-drick's direction doesn't help much: The film is so dark and static it merely heightens the overall effect of ponderosity...

...The whole adventure is preposterous, irrational and totally captivating...

...The sweet smell or success is the kind of movie Kramer used to make and has the sort of theme he would certainly have known how to handle more interestingly...

...The human element, as you might expect, is the least interesting aspect of the film, but Cary Grant behaves with restrained nobility as the British sea captain and Frank Sinatra is more or less credible as the uncouth Spanish guerrilla...

...Based on C. S. Forester's The Gun, Kramer's epic focuses its cameras over the desperate beauty of the Spanish landscape, records a number of awesome scenes involving tens of thousands of cheap Spanish extras, even manages to make you care what happens to the huge cannon, "the mighty one," that is the real hero of the story...

...wrote the screenplay, has fashioned a lugubrious melodramatic wheeze of a plot that all but obscures the hypnotizing milieu, leaving us only an occasional tantalizing glimpse of the "pals" carousing at Toots Shor's, conning the girls, and buying and selling each other all over town...

...Burt Lancaster is miscast as the Winchell-type columnist, but the one distinguishing feature of the movie is an astonishingly good performance by Tony Curtis as the frantic, unscrupulous young press agent...

...His portrayal of this seamy character is sharp, sensitive and very convincing...

...The cannon, abandoned by a defeated and hastily retreating Spanish army, is the only one large enough to blow down the walls of Avila, where the French have established their headquarters...

...A wonderfully colorful spectacle, it abounds in scenic marvels as it spins out a simple though moderately interesting tale quite capable of enthralling the reasonably alert 12-year-old who is considered representative of our mass audience...

...In fact, this movie is so pleasing in an infantile way that I doubt very much whether our popular critics will ever forgive Kramer for abandoning the artistic pretensions he indulged in such tense, low-budget films as Death of a Salesman, The Men and High Noon...

...Perhaps his heart just wasn't in it...

...In addition to a plot that would have barely passed muster during the original run of East Lynne (though perhaps Ernest Lehman, the original author of the story, should be censured for that), he has concocted the kind of tortured, metaphor-hounded dialogue that weights the eyelids...

...He's certainly come a long way as an actor, but he gets no help from Odets: I know the original model, and he is a far more interesting, ingratiating and complex character...

...Only Sophia Loren is improbable as the love interest, but then it seems to be axiomatic that every Western still needs a girl to balance the cowboy's love for his horse, a device probably intended to keep Freudians at bay...

...Instead, Clifford Odets, who...

...Parenthetically, I'd better note that I haven't yet seen de Mille's The Ten Commandments, because he's pretty good at this kind of thing, too...

...I've never succumbed to the delusion, once popular, that Odets is a major playwright, but I never thought, on the other hand, that he would be capable of such indifferent writing...

...We could have been treated to a searching inside view of the limbo world of night clubs frequented by the slugs who feed on each other, the wretches clawing for space on the fringes of success, and all the other odd creatures who live under rocks and thrive on the garbage heaps of gossip...

...The time is 1810, and the background is Napoleon's campaign to subdue the Spaniards...

...Actually, this Hecht-Hill-Lancaster production could have been a dilly, since it is no secret with the night people that its portrayal of a power-mad gossip columnist and the sycophantic press agent who "feeds" him is supposed to be drawn from life...

...It does not, however, pretend to be anything but what it is, an entertainment, and it is the best one of its kind I've seen since Land of the Pharaohs, another potboiler served up in gaudy historical trappings...