On Screen:
MURRAY, WILLIAM
On SCREEN By William Murray Sayonara' and Wild Is the Wind' The holidays brought a crop of big, splashy commercial films from Hollywood, some of them pretty entertaining. One of the best is...
...To me the most interesting aspect of this film was the opportunity it afforded of watching Marlon Brando work under the directorial guidance of that old magician, Joshua Logan, whose work has consistently fascinated if not always delighted me...
...She even sings a nice Neapolitan song, in a surprisingly small, enchanting voice...
...Then, too, I had recently read Truman Capote's long magazine interview with the actor, in which it was implied that Brando considered his part in the movie as something of a joke...
...Everything that happens is easily predictable from the moment Anna Magnani, as the imported Italian wife, arrives at the Reno airport with Anthony Quinn, as a clumsy blusterer with a heart of gold and a ranch as big as Rhode Island...
...And there is, also, that old standby, the middlebrow racial message, which can be outlined most succinctly as follows: It is quite all right, even admirable, for a white man to make love to a female member of the colored races, but it is not quite all right for a colored man to embrace a white woman, though it is now permissible for an Oriental to address her circumspectly from a distance of at least four feet...
...There are no quiet Italians in Hollywood...
...Despite the somewhat corny story and a script that only occasionally lifts itself out of a morass of high-sounding cliches, I was, for the most part, reasonably diverted...
...He slouches and shuffles through the part of the love-struck American major and stares at the other members of the cast out of the corners of his eyes...
...Quinn, who gets better with every film, makes a sympathetic human being out of the Italo-American boor, and Anna Magnani, looking more disheveled than ever, hams magnificently through the part of his tempestuous bride...
...Still, Brando is Brando, which is to say that, even not at his best, he is interesting to watch...
...The scenery, for one thing, is exquisite and the side glimpses into the various ways the Japanese entertain themselves are interesting as well as tasteful...
...Set on the high sheep ranges of northern Nevada, this movie also benefits from the scenery, though director George Cukor is more interested in his characters than in the awesome sweep of mountains against the sky...
...It was said that, to confuse Logan, he had cooked up a near-farcical corn-pone accent that, to his consternation, was hailed by Logan and later by the critics as a master stroke of histrionic subtlety...
...Unfortunately, the characters aren't much more than stereotypes...
...The Japanese in the film are all extremely decorative, and there is the unexpected bonus of a bright, winning performance from Red Buttons, a reformed TV comic, as a GI whose mixed marriage causes a good deal of anguish...
...there are two muscular naked men's torsos on display—Brando's and Ricardo Montalban's...
...Superior acting rescues the film from total banality...
...there are, mercifully, great gaps in the dialogue while people convey their thoughts by a twitch here, a jerk there...
...Perhaps the best thing about it is the use of a color process that brings the settings and elaborate costumes vividly to life, endowing all the scenes with a suitable Oriental flavor, though I am certainly no competent judge of all one sees that's Japanese...
...One of the best is Sayonara, a long, unabashed love story by James Michener out of Madame Butterfly...
...and the background effects are miraculously attuned to the action, as if Logan himself were poised over the dials of some monstrous emotional hi-fi machine...
...Another overly pretentious movie that has some good moments is Wild Is the Wind, a serviceable potboiler cribbed from Sidney Howard's old play, They Knew What They Wanted...
...Naturally, all of this intrigued me, so I was all the more disappointed when nothing really happened...
...Logan's work is standard for him: There are a great many close-ups that bring the actors looming onto the screen as majestically as the heads on Mount Rushmore...
...Anthony Franciosa stands around and charms everybody in sight, but I'm beginning to think he's one-dimensional as an actor...
...The corn-pone accent seems neither a stroke of genius nor an attempt to sabotage the movie, though I did find it hard to believe that anyone so incoherent could be the supposedly refined and well-educated son of a West Point general and the childhood sweetheart of a young lady whose appearance and diction would reflect glory on Bryn Mawr...
...Brando, too, seems only himself, no better or worse than usual...
...I consider Brando to be one of our most compelling actors, occasionally a great one, and I anticipated that the combination would set off some creative sparks...
...Then there are the sheep, but they don't contribute much, even in the way of atmosphere...
Vol. 41 • January 1958 • No. 4
