On Screen

...The Eighth Day of the Week (filmed in the bombed-out slums of Warsaw) and The Sound and the Fury are opposite sides of the same film coin: banal stories of decadence inside crumbling architecture, supposedly starring sexually frustrated youth, but actually highlighted by elaborate (Sound) or dirt-cheap (Eighth Day) production jobs...

...From the moment that the town derelict (Dean Martin) tries to fish a half-dollar out of the saloon's cuspidor, the movie's emphasis is less on pumping lead into the audience than on exploiting Hawks' movie birthright—the building of abstract ploys based on a high-toned, Social Register notion of grace, decorum, even wholesomeness...

...Lonelyhearts has the same eccentric interest and awfulness of Some Came Running, but it still packs more vitality than anything Schary conceived as MGM's production boss...

...When considered only as whole works somewhere between dud and masterpiece, the following films not only shrink in interest but are too easily pigeon-holed: Rio Bravo is a big version of High Noon (four law defenders cornered inside a cowardly town by a brother team that has untold hired guns to sacrifice in a harvest of in-town violence), a pleasant disappointment with bits of graceful, semi-humorous American dead-panning as only Howard Hawks can spread on a screen...

...Not even Nathanael West, an expert in making emptiness surrealistic-ally horrible, can equal Schary's horror when he is showing the fine constructive life: Pa mowing the front lawn, Buster flipping a football and Sis, a soaped-up version of D. W. Griffith's sweet unguided Missylles, dating Clift in the family limousine...

...Forbidden Fruit details the short and unhappy infidelity of a Milquetoast doctor, a perfect "French film," but, except for some talented James Cain-type pornography and honest comments on listless afternoon bar life, only moderately interesting...

...Often a movie's mistakes are inconsequential beside the seemingly picayune contributions of a bit player (Jackie Coogan in Lonelyhearts, a colored teenager in Sound and Fury) scoring his usual victory in modern bitterness...

...The wonder of Hawks' underhand style is in scenes that have a silent, ticking explosiveness, where his tricky figure deployment and slightly off-center characterization steer the film out of what seems like $3 million of cliche Westernism...

...Most importantly, Hawks and Jules Furthman (a fine, unnoticed scriptwriter) unsuccessfully excluded the motorcvcle-corvette-cattledrive gimmick that makes Hawks' films "go" (while Hawks and his whimsically tough scriptwriters are fooling around, improvising in soft-shoe far beyond the borders of the actual plot...

...Where Hawks' best films (Big Sleep) are surrealistic caravans that never pass the same street corner twice, Rio Bravo is mostly ambushed in a jail where a sheriff, a drunk and a cripple are holding a prisoner against a gang of miserably unconvincing hoods...

...Finally, there is the familiar figure from another medium, turning to films with expected results: Mike Kellin...

...But most of Rio Bravo is recall, a sign of decline that still reveals Hawks' genius with placement, his ability to build a symphony based on diversions having to do with the landscaping of action...

...Despite the facile tone of Stapleton's acting, this series of scenes in hotel and taxicab have the zig-zag authenticity of hot tabloid stuff, where the people change face with an unpredictability that leaves the reader gasping...

...On SCREEN Underground Magic, Eccentric Vitality and Artful Direction Salvage Banal Stories By Manny Farber SINCE EVERY film is the product of an agglomeration of technicians who are situated in different spots of the universe in relation to art, business and talent, the real fascination of a movie isn't the sum total of esthetic effects, but the underground channels created by each artist pursuing his path...

...Occasionally, in Martin's shuffling, easy movements, so fluid as to be imperceptible, the movie catches Hawks' nonchalant to,ne with actors...

...almost human...

...Schary's big studio creations (The Next Voice You Hear, Battleground) were regulated for the family trade and filled with cheap soap opera about the civic health of American guys named Joe, mechanical constructions that were the furthest remove from Lonelyhearts, which, if nothing else, is human: a collection of pretentious actors who seem unleashed, a weird script in which the normal out-hallucinate the crack-pots, TV-style direction that ends many scenes on a face staring straight ahead, waiting for the camera image to change...

...When Schary contacts something familial, even a father who's resting in the pen for murdering mother, the screen goes rigidly antiseptic, like a toothpaste commercial censored by the State Department before being sent to a crisis spot in the cold war...

...Perhaps the most satisfying of underground pleasures is to see the fantastic technician (Walter Brennan in Rio Bravo) building with suicidal force within a stale, corrupt, losing proposition...

...The ending is the most electric example of movie magic: the finest cab scene since Waterfront, thanks to Stapleton's acting and a rare reading of taxicab culture, particularly its cockeyed composition of figures...

...Fortunately, each movie has an iceberg's hidden resources — the continuity of interest represented by each technician's following or veering from a battle-scarred path that has been "long abuilding" and seems more crucial than the generalization of any single picture...

...Unlike any other experience to be gained in films, Rio Bravo leaves the spectator with a touching memory, consisting entirely of plastic effects produced with choreographed action, the route from stable to bar taken by a fleeing criminal (done mostly with words), the path taken by a rifle as it whips diagonally across a face, and countless other "maps" of humanity — of hands, reclining body in relation to stairway, doors to other doors—that produce a curiously poignant effect in a film that is supposedly without message or mind...

...For no discernible reason, Lonelyhearts counters the ugliness of newspapers and their clientele with "healthy" scenes — the family huddled around a TV set is supposed to carry itself as propaganda without the slightest injection of magic...

...Apart from the central palace of its story, Jerry Wald's The Sound and the Fury is a voluptuous de-Mille-cunning production filled with "extras...

...In many ways, Sound is a bad joke: Its main story drags: its central players are frighteningly bad mannerists, each with a "special" walk and a wide assortment of shakes, toupees and mumbles...

...finally, in the movie's best stretch, is seduced by a stranger with a wildly mean tongue (Maureen Stapleton...

...In the story, Montgomery Clift shoulder-shudders through a role that is nipped by everything but bloodhounds: as a fledgling lovelorn columnist, Clift is driven nearly crazy by the misery that writes for advice, is lectured by editor Robert Ryan (archly overjoyed monosyllabic overacting), mothered by Ryan's wife Myrna Loy (mummified and breathy) and...

...and, in this day of corruptly directed crowds, this film has inordinately skilled direction of nobodies languoring or shuffling off to nowhere...

...the main ideas are cornier than the stains that fog the doors and walls of the old plantation house...

...whose hand has been like a mechanical claw on films, suddenly appear in work that is technically unpredictable...

...Not even George Stevens (A Place in the Sun), nor Joshua Logan (Picnic), nor Elia Kazan (East of Eden) has been able to enclose a contemporaneous scene so completely, producing a Within Naturalism that is massively silent and contained, like a good Edward Hopper painting, and that offers shrewdly observed material to satisfy any town-o-phile...

...An exquisite pleasure in movie-going is to watch a long-time debit (George Simenon, Dore Schary...

...Many things have slowed Hawks' skill besides an inability with color (Rio Bravo is photographed through a piece of seaweed) and an aging lead athlete (John Wayne) who still moves well in fast action but in standing around, like latter-day Henry Fonda and Clark Gable, seems nailed together...

...However, everything outside the story (which isn't Faulkner's as advertised, but actually Tennessee Williams' castration nonsense wrapped in a slick-magazine guise) is sharply etched and fairly gripping for an opulent movie...

...a fine actor in TV pot-boilers, projects a convincing low-brow garrulity in Lonelyhearts, a film that is otherwise plagued by talent over-riding roles that should be buried almost from sight in plebian mediocrity...

...After his cheerful American chauvinisms for MGM, it figures that Schary's first determined attempt at an ugly subject and somber feeling is confused by his old MGM sickness...

...Rio Bravo is a soft, slack, not very rousing Western by a man (Howard Hawks) who knows better, having supervised a nearly endless chain of masterful journey films...

...The straw hats in a cavernous general store, a hungry theater wall across the village square, the worn-out patterns on carnival grounds, particularly the touching material that is parlayed from open fields, (a battered) station wagon—this bric-a-brac of American desolation is caught in good phlegm-green harmonies, the best use of large-screen composing that has been seen in Vista Vision...

...Lonelyhearts turns a revered novel of pessimism into a semi-optimistic newspaper story, confused in casting, rigid in story-telling, but mildly gripping because of its TV-style intimacy and drive...