On Screen
MURRAY, WILLIAM
On SCREEN By William Murray Four Films of Varying Merit Billy Wilder's Love in the Afternoon is a pleasant throwback to the sophisticated, brittle comedy of the Thirties and I recommend it to all...
...Miss Mansfield is still on hand and she has been directed to parody all the more obvious mannerisms of Marilyn Monroe...
...who wrote the play, was heard to compare himself to Evelyn Waugh...
...Or if Barrymore might have been redeemed by the love of a good woman...
...Originally, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter...
...Nor is the acting anything to write home about: Gable is more wooden than ever, Yvonne de Carlo succeeds in being Yvonne de Carlo, and Sidney Poitier stands around looking sullen and oppressed...
...They occur quite early in the picture and you can safely skip the rest of it...
...He also thought deeply about all of his roles and developed his skill with make-up to the level of high artistry...
...In addition to being a staggering bore, it's also unbelievably inept technically—garish use of color, clumsy editing and static direction being the more obvious faults...
...Why not Oscar Wilde...
...I'd better qualify all this enthusiasm, however, by saying that Love in the Afternoon does have a couple of dull stretches, and none of the comedy ever reaches the very high level of Bringing Up Baby, Topper or The Thin Man...
...Still...
...Man of a Thousand Faces is an uneven, occasionally interesting biography of the curious career of Lon Chancy, the only man who ever became a great star by portraying the monstrous and the supernatural...
...What counts is their work, not their private difficulties, especially when the latter fall into such a soapy and dreary old rut...
...Cagney, an old vaudevillian himself, is thoroughly convincing as a struggling song-and-dance man who breaks into pictures as a bit player with a skill at make-up and a flair for the grotesque...
...Karloff and Lugosi, after all, built their careers on one ghoul apiece...
...Also on hand is an imperturbable and authentic gypsy ensemble that provides a hilarious musical commentary on Cooper's seduction scenes...
...The whole thing is a disaster...
...Filmed entirely in Paris, this one recounts the exotic and highly improbable adventures of a young lady cellist, played by Audrey Hepburn in her usual elfin style, with an established and very rich American roue, whose lines are mumbled ingratiatingly by our old friend Gary Cooper...
...The only other service it performed was the questionable one of launching the career of Miss Jayne Mansfield, who resembles nothing so much as an old Petty calendar...
...What makes the movie at all worthwhile is James Cagney's sensitive, intelligent portrait of Chaney...
...I think you'll find it entertaining...
...I'd only like to add that on a recent television interview George Axelrod...
...On SCREEN By William Murray Four Films of Varying Merit Billy Wilder's Love in the Afternoon is a pleasant throwback to the sophisticated, brittle comedy of the Thirties and I recommend it to all those of you who cherish, as I do, nostalgic memories of those happy diversions involving Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant, Melvyn Douglas and Irene Dunne, William Powell and Myrna Loy, Roland Young and Constance Bennett...
...After all, who cares if Percy Shelley was mean to the wife and kids...
...In fact, the film starts out so promisingly and includes so much good material on the early days of the movie industry that it's all the more disappointing when, halfway through, it deteriorates into the conventional backstage drama of the dedicated artist in conflict with his matrimonial responsibilities...
...The former is a great big splashy Civil War drama crammed with juicy cliches and pomposities on everything from the inevitable course of true love to the rights of man...
...Maurice Chevalier plays the girl's father, a private eye specializing in hot scandal cases, with skill, polish and what must easily be the world's most charming smile...
...The attempt is cruel and savage without being in the least funny, and the rest of the humor is on a similarly low level, abounding in dirty visual gags and sleazy double enlendres...
...The few scenes in which Cagney recreates some of Chaney's great cinematic moments are absorbing...
...was a cheap little Broadway comedy, very loosely based on the Faust legend, that took some unsubtle digs at that favorite old target, Hollywood...
...According to the movie, Chaney was in sympathy with freaks and monsters because his own parents were deaf-mutes...
...Two OF the worst films I've seen this year are Rand of In gels and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter...
...It also leans much too heavily all the way through on the trite French romanticism that adultery is a glorious and wholly admirable human occupation...
...In the movie version, the target has become television and the Faust motif has been discarded...
Vol. 40 • October 1957 • No. 42
