Three Art-y Films

...When his films hit a provocative moment, two men (father and son or old political cronies or Young Turks I are as close as two front teeth, finding communion in such strong pulls of Depressionera fiction as "militant goodness...

...Robert Siodmak (The Killers) is working at second speed on an un-glossed Vuillard-plain image of a women-strangler whose fifty or more murders cast a dreadful spot on the inferiority of Aryan police...

...Jules Dassin now changes stride with a white one: pleasant to look at...

...Pierre Vaneck) whose goodness is evolved with a taut, worn athleticism: a sun-blasted landscape caught handsomely in shadowless photography...

...Filled with animalistic touches, too black or white mainliness, events that start well but end up in Marxian ruts...

...When Ritt brings his bruising, unstylish closetwo technique to bear on working class goodness (Edge of the City), the fihn's grimacing goes from bathos to worse...

...Each work is victimized by an attitude—the muddlebrow's mock-serious pride in creativity—that places little tension on ex-studio slaves, allowing them to function far below the form shown in big studios, where commercialism and censorship often force a subterranean inventiveness...

...Sailing wham into a bocce-balled-up production by the Girosi-Ponti team, the movie presents a mismatched crew of non-conformist actors given complete freedom to exploit their flair for neuroses...

...In the movie's peak scene, the village idiot (always on the limit for food, always eating) wanders into a pick-up meal with a spinsterish Jewess, and the movie settles down, as though forever, as idiocy meets hopeless loneliness in a drifting conversation played as silently as any Vuillard painting of inverted domesticity...

...Dassin sinks his directing fangs into pink-liberal hoke and makes it far more puzzling and sinister than any of Steinbeck's undubious battling...

...nevertheless, not much to think about...

...having escaped the chauvinistic chains of home studios, finds himself gasping for breath under the weighty blanket of freedom...

...Almost rubbing his hands off to energize table-bound scenes...

...The plot of He Who Must Die (from a novel by Nikos Kazantzakis) has as many links as its author's name, but it is a good one about some Greek peasants, the cast of a Passion play, enacting their Biblical roles in a "real" event having to do with helping a refugee band or siding with a "fatbellied Pope...

...Using a wonderful roughened stone (Mario Adorf) as the shambling killer and shifting between a curious lack of technique and gymnastic inventiveness out of the old experimental film kettle, this ghoulish portrait accomplishes a feat that is rare in current mixed-goodies film...

...Quinn has many exciting scenes between grins, such as ruminating over a widow's delights while going through a neatly timed job of tie-shirt-coat sprucing...

...after years at the bottom of Hollywood's barrel, is a lightningly facile technician...

...Always corny in its broad conception of villains (a miser who's ptterned after an anteater), this allegorical whatsis makes most of its effective strokes with heroic whiteness —two blondes I Melina Mercouri...

...The Black Orchid filled with dark intensity and the dullness only Sophia Loren can generate when she sinks her nose into a solid acting part, shows a sullen Italian-American widow doing very little but somehow driving people into states verging on madness...

...Dassin's films recall early Steinbeck novels, except for one difference that makes them more interesting...

...However, it is almost worth the admission price to follow the portrait of a hummingly normal looney...

...one world...

...Only Anthony Quinn, a cheerful widower whose grown daughter locks herself in bedrooms like Dickson Carr victims, rides through this production, handling his one note (burp-gun masculinity) with style and bravado...

...religious experience (He Who Must Die) and psychiatry (The Black Orchid) came to a halt around the Spanish Civil War...

...Ritt's good movies (No Down Paymenl) deal with smart cynicism circa 1962, handled by intellectual zipguns (Tony Randall...

...Via his two bullseyes in art theaters...

...down with moneygrubbers...

...Most of Siodmak's comment on Hitler's Reich is a dated recall of Hitchcock-Reed thrillers, plus an even sadder use of West German "politics" (as in The Young Lions, The Enemy Below) which shows the Reichland overrun with anti-Nazis and infected with a murderous dissaffection for war...

...After gloomy gus-undheit's husband is in a gangster's grave, the low-budget gem starts table hopping, from card table to breakfast table, skipping the most visually promising scenes (husband's murder by brother rats, boy caught tampering with parking meter...

...Like a pirate in his scavenging of classics and in his swashbuckling manner of evolving sensuous imagery...

...At their deepest level, all of Jules Dassin's films are involved with brotherly love, and everything else is a be-kind-to-laborers spray that covers the film's windshield, giving a fake impression of "ideas...

...Much of his imagery casts a tang of propaganda...

...However, by the time the movie completes it whitewash, making the lowly villagers seem like beeauteeful stones and high-and-mighty "capitalists" like disagreeable custard, a lot of untidy laundry has been sagging an interesting story line...

...Dassin's buddy-buddy obsession is interesting in that the plot, messy and over-threaded, is only subordinately involved with The Duet, which, appearing as erratically as it disappears, knocks the story construction completely out of shape...

...Dassin has become a leader in the creamless movie and coffee circuit, a cloaked figure whose mixture makes films that are easy to dislike and hard to categorize...

...Where Steinbeck is a free and obvious plotter...

...On SCREEN By Manny Farber Three Art-y Films THANKS TO a climate rife with tax loopholes, crumbling censorship codes and a wandering sickness that drives film citizenry from island to island, each new film presents a melting-pot dilemma: The independent reigns, but individuality drains out of his mixed-nations productions...

...Where Dassin's international potpourri has a helpless discomfort about its Potemkin mimicry, as though he were trying to change a diaper in midstream, Siodmak's best moments, flexibly relaxed or tight, seem comfortably inventive...

...uses sex energy everywhere, moving freely or against itself, even in underdone material involving the ordering of a sundae...

...Except for bits of Robert Siodmak's dryly amusing portrait of an impervious mass killer, the following films are all products of the same drag, an elite intellectual whose ideas on fascism (The Devil Strikes at Night...

...Producting soggy spots through his pictures...

...which starts on the infantile "science" level of M and becomes a more interesting picture of violence, played suicidally as far into gentleness as credibility allows...

...In The Devil Strikes at Sight...

...Director Martin Ritt, who engineers the nice positive in-the-scene vitality while showing a curious disregard for the niceties of composition...

...They are stamped with an aimless liberalism, as though the Oscar headhunter...

...Having made a black film (Rififi) of burglaring, bosom shots and acid-y dark tones...

...with a delicate, if stale artistry, but...

...Ritt here orgone-izes his minority couplets so that they seem to be in super-communication with each other: his Reikian direction forcing actors into impossible situations—Mark Richmond assaying a premarital smile of contentment with pork sausage filling his mouth...

...but it has a devilish under-effect produced with what seem like decorative nothings: inserting countrified ambulation (the eccentric path of action) in everything from a scar to a peasant's stutter, and working soft lecherous exercises with skin-hair-clothes textures...

...Dassin...