On Screen

...Love at Twenty, further, indicates that Marcel Ophiils, the son of Max, may in time become a director of note, though at the moment, like his late father, he tends toward sentimental trivialities...

...Love at Twenty consists of five episodes—French, Italian, German, Japanese and Polish—related only insofar as in each a young writer-director from the respective country has a look at some aspect of youthful love...

...There is, to begin with, the matter of sheer ignorance...

...Thus, in the German episode, the young journalist who flies back from Singapore to see his illegitimate child, born a week before, tells its mother how brave she has been...

...I'm scared it's going to sting," protests the brave fellow, and we have the first hint of the irony which informs this little parable...

...Mood and character are thus falsified...

...hence the well-deserved sarcastic barb of "noticed," which the "realized" blunts to nothingness...

...In the Polish episode, made by the highly talented Andrzej Wajda (whose Kanal is a masterpiece, and whose other films all have moments of brilliance), a young man rescues a child from the polar bears' pit at the zoo...

...No less sinister are the omissions of bits of dialogue which seem unimportant to the translators, a needless diversion of the viewers' attention from the images...

...Two new films, / Could Go on Singing and A Child Is Waiting, should make it abundantly clear to any but the most rabid Judiolatrists that the old Judy is no more, and that the new Judy never was...

...Renzo Rossellini, who made the Italian installment, takes over exactly where his father left off— grandiosely wallowing in vacuity...

...Since the film is in five languages, it gives the subtitle writers a splendid chance to show off their incompetence in no less than six languages...

...But Roberto, with a little help from the late war, made a genuine contribution to the film, which now enables two Rossellinis to have one brilliant future behind them...

...She is a terrible little bourgeoise, he tells her...

...Granted these are valid considerations, but 1 am convinced that more intelligent compromises could be found...

...It is the sort of thing one inaugurates Lincoln Center with, but it is not music...

...More dangerous, because more frequent, is the insensitivity to detail, to the tone or overtones of a statement, to its originality and literary value...

...I have, however, serious doubts whether the garish spectacle of retarded children makes a suitable background for a story that is only a short cut above the standard Hollywood "drama," complete with child star who, though supposedly retarded, seems intelligent and attractive enough for Groton...

...in the second, someone else, which is impossible...

...No doubt about it, the worst subtitles are still preferable to dubbing, but must we really have the worst subtitles...

...It is typical, however, that in the Italian episode, which is as trashy in its dialogue as in everything else, great care was taken to translate almost every insipid platitude...

...But something has only just begun to dawn on him...

...The truly deplorable thing to consider is the effect premature stardom is apt to have on a Hollywood personality...

...ON SCREEN By John Simon Love at Twenty Despair at Forty Love at Twenty is like a dusty, bumpy, twisting country road: not easy to drive along, leading nowhere in particular, but sometimes charming or scenic...

...In the French episode, the young people are music and hi-fi enthusiasts...

...Symphonies of the same period, if you like, but by different composers...

...What Love at Twenty does demonstrate is that Truffaut, though always competent, has exhausted the reminiscent, quasi-autobiographical vein of The 400 Blows (by the way, what a mistranslation that title is...

...The second question raised by Love at Twenty is that of the episodic film: Can a collection of short stories be effective on screen...

...Later on, the hero tries to justify himself to the girl for not marrying her...

...In Miss Garland we now have someone whose physical and psychic development has been arrested, who has neither youth nor age, but as it were a senescent infantilism belonging only in the paintings of Boterò, and not even there...

...Ah, so you've noticed it, too...

...Better subtitles could produce better—if not bigger—audiences...

...Five unrelated short films—even if each deals with the vaguely unifying topic of young love—tend to create the effect of several movements of different symphonies played consecutively...

...For the film, unlike writing, exists in time more than in space, and so resembles music rather than literature...

...First, the question of subtitles...

...There the heroes of Greektragedy—that high point of linguistic beauty and purity—emerged as purveyors of solecisms such as "I cannot help but stop," or illiteracies like "Who can a man turn to...

...Such mistranslation can reach alarming proportions...

...and must move on to other themes...

...Lastly, there is the inevitable bad English, which strikes one as even more offensive in the subtitles of a film like Michael Cacoyannis' Electra...

...When the girl notices that her hero has scratched his hand during the rescue, she proceeds to put iodine on the wound...

...But the subtitle reads, "So you realized, too...

...In A Child Is Waiting, the avant-gardist John Cassavetes demonstrates that, given the chance, he makes as good a commercial director as the next fellow, but not much more...

...I remember with especial horror a subtitle in Clouzot's The Truth, in which the accused Brigitte Bardot is told by the judge that already as a little girl she stole her sister's doll...

...I doubt also whether Abbie Mann's attempted mingling of documentary and fictional techniques in the screenplay helps either mode, and whether the protracted exposure to so many authentically deformed, jabbering little creatures will produce on the audience the desired effect and not its opposite, as it did on me...

...Clever as it is, though, I regret his archly stylized treatment of sexual intercourse in a sequence that otherwise subsists happily on imaginatively heightened realism...

...The legitimate husband of the woman in the adjoining hospital bed comments ironically, "Ach, so haben Sie's auch gemerkt...

...But to the subtitle writer it is, "They talked stereophonically," which, if it had any meaning, might imply that they blared at each other from every nook and cranny...

...she should have gone to Switzerland for an abortion: "If we here in Europe were to have kids right away, würden wir uns gegenseitig auf den Füssen herumtrampeln"—"we would be stamping around on one another's feet...

...The Japanese sequence, by Shintaro Ishihara, a name which it is too early to start struggling to remember, is distinguished only by derivative montage and gratuitous violence...

...I cannot vouch for the Japanese part, but the very paucity of subtitles seems indicative...

...In the first of these films...

...Now "realized" is exactly the wrong word here...

...This so impresses an impetuous young girl that she takes him to her home and bed...

...The argument for the defense, of course, is that you can't keep people reading when they should be watching, and that too much print obliterates the pictures...

...And I have no doubt that our graduate schools and the ranks of our less established and pecunious littérateurs could be made to yield translators of greater competence...

...English, as usual, included...

...Only, I think, if the impact is cumulative, and if there is thematic development...

...The result suggests that Beaumarchais was a poetic albatross ineffectually dragging his wings when forced down into prose—whereas, if anything, the opposite is the case...

...But the subtitulists blithely ignore the statement...

...I Could Go on Singing is, despite the able Ronald Neame (who gave us Tunes of Glory), merely standard fare in an age without standards...

...The word used for "steal"—a deliberately somewhat grandiloquent one to poke fun at bureaucracy—was dérober, and, sure enough, in the fractured French subtitle this came out as "already as a little girl you would take the clothes off your sister's dolls," implying that, instead of being merely selfish and childishly amoral, the unhappy girl was a lesbian fetishist and incestuous voyeur...

...Not only is this inaccurate but, worse, it suggests a pretentiousness of diction wholly alien to the gifted François Truffaut...

...Again, in a new film version by the Comédie Française of Figaro's Marriage, Beaumarchais' elegant and witty prose is translated into the basest basic English, whereas the songs are taken from Jacques Barzun's printed translation...

...and that Wajda, even in his minor efforts, bears watching and thinking about...

...I shall pass over the fact that her face has become that of a wizened child—rather like what Mae West used to call Shirley Temple, "a 50-year-old midget"— and that her figure resembles the giant economy-size tube of tooth paste in girls' bathrooms: Squeezed intemperately at all points, it acquires a shape that defies definition by the most resourceful solid geometrician...

...Nor shall I dwell on Miss Garland's acting, which surpasses that of any doyenne of the Actors' Studio for unrelieved substitution of hysterics for histrionics, so that the reading of a line is punctuated not by pauses for breathing but by spasms of the larynx...

...If the young man were, in fact, realizing anything even at this late stage, the irony would be uncalled for...

...As a film, it has no specific importance, but it does raise two general questions that merit attention...

...The narrator observes at one point, "Ils se parlaient stéréophonie," which, of course, means, "They talked about stereo...

...Speaking of futures in the past, I know of no more terrifying example than that of Judy Garland...

...Miss Garland plays herself, which is horrifying...

...But the subtitle has it, "there wouldn't be room any more...

...Which goes to show that there is less concern here for the audience's ability to keep up than indomitable bad taste and poor judgment on the part of the translators...