On Screen
MURRAY, WILLIAM
On SCREEN By William Murray 3 Good Films and 3 Great Shorts Up UNTIL the last 20 months, No Down Payment succeeds in being an interesting and pertinent movie, which makes it all the more...
...after that, the going is heavy...
...Les Girls is a huge, lavish musical that just misses being a very good one...
...To see these old movies of more than twenty years ago is to realize, too, how dismally the quality of American remedy has deteriorated since...
...In Europe, he is scarcely known and certainly unappreciated, which is too bad, because you could learn more about America from one W. C. Fields skit than from almost any full-length movies, book or play...
...It is all there— the toughness, the independence, the Philistinism, the satiric observation, the drive to make good, the blustering and bullying, the fear of the female, the hatred of humbug, the refuge in drink...
...Working in his most facile vein, the format of the thriller, Greene portrays the undoing of a colossal swindler fleeing from the British police and eventually trapped in a dreary Mexican border town...
...Also everybody is always asking prying questions and offering unsolicited advice...
...The biggest cinematic bargain of the year is something called the W C. Fields Festival, consisting of three of his most riotous 20-minute shorts: The Barber Shop, The Pharmacist and The Fatal Glass of Beer...
...Martin Kilt's direction is laul...
...As a matter of fact, I can't imagine the libretto holding anyone's attention without the benefit of Kay Kendall, a long-legged, scoop-nosed, absolutely enchanting English girl with an uninhibited approach to comedy and an expert sense of timing...
...And then, of course, there's the problem of the unhappy wife or husband who decides to seek temporary solace elsewhere...
...The main trouble is John Patrick's script, which, though amusing enough, tends to suffocate Cole Porter's songs and the agile dancing of Gene Kelly, Taina Elg (where have they been keeping her...
...On SCREEN By William Murray 3 Good Films and 3 Great Shorts Up UNTIL the last 20 months, No Down Payment succeeds in being an interesting and pertinent movie, which makes it all the more irritating that the boys at 20th Century-Fox had to ruin everything by tacking on an improbable melodramatic ending to conform to the law that wrongdoing cannot, on celluloid, go unpunished...
...From a runaway bicycle bearing down on a flock of chickens, he screams: "Out of the way...
...Most of the musical numbers occur in the first two-thirds of the picture...
...Across the Bridge is one of his minor efforts, but with the aid of a brilliant performance by Rod Steiger it succeeds in being consistently absorbing...
...and Mitzi Gaynor...
...you fools...
...WHEN Graham Greene isn't struggling under the weight of his tortured religious speculations, he is a writer of extraordinary skill...
...I'm going to go on record with a flat statement that anyone who doesn't think Fields is a great comic must be un-American...
...Steiger, who has irritated me in the past with mannerisms and gratuitous vocal tricks, is nothing short of brilliant as the swindler...
...She and Kelly knock off the best tune in the show, and I guess there isn't anything she can't do well...
...sharp and sensitive to the environment, and he has a fine cast to work with, including Joanne Woodward, Cameron Mitchell and Pat Hingle, three of our better young actors...
...All in all, it's a searching little peek at the underside of the American Dream, and it should make you pretty happy to be stuck in your dirty old tenement...
...The young people are full of bright dreams, their houses are equipped with all the modern conveniences (none of them paid for), they all love each other and have bright careers ahead of them, but somehow nobody seems to be having a very good time...
...One of the more obvious reasons, I'd say, is the absence of privacy: Someone is always peering in your picture window at the worst moment to find out if you "wanna havva cuppa coffee" or strolling past your back door just as you and the little woman are having it out...
...Fields wrote his own material and peppered his performances with fantastic ad libs...
...He begins by showing you a man impossible to like, an unscrupulous tyrant guilty of almost every crime...
...The plot abounds in clever twists without ever becoming implausible, and the movie is full of subtle little pictorial touches that help to keep things moving...
...And it is all wildly funny, doubly so because you feel the impact of a truthful and completely original mind at work...
...Gradually, through the man's degradation and his love for an animal which befriends him, Steiger succeeds in revealing the human being beneath the blood and the dirt, in making you care what happens to this confirmed delinquent...
...Based on a current best-seller by John MacPartland, No Down Payment examines the lives of four young couples living in a California subdivision, one of those exurban housing developments mushrooming on the outskirts of every large American city...
...It's an acting tour ie force, alone worth the price of admission...
...The supporting cast is adequate, but only the dug- a soulful-eyed setter, manages to keep from being badly upstaged...
Vol. 40 • November 1957 • No. 45
