On Screen

...one part demigod...

...and The Ugly American, concerning Sarkhan (a pseudonymous Vietnam) and its political and military turmoil...

...Is there no greatness that Hollywood, the great leveler, cannot flatten into a pancake...

...We recognize no human beings, only thefts from more humane filmmakers: Chaplin, Truffaut, the Keystone Kops...

...But Jose Ferrer, as the chief of police, is unexpectedly authentic and even touching, and J. S. Casshyap's Gandhi is satisfactory...

...Is there, perhaps, an idea behind this...

...The risible incompetence of the subtitles provides the only relief from boredom...

...Since his relatively modest start with Le Beau Serge, Chabrol has bombarded us with such grandiloquent trash as The Cousins and such indescribably boring pieces of inhumanity as Leda...

...MacWhite's character makes little sense...

...Similarly, MacWhite, whom we are to view as an honest, intelligent, strong but humanly fallible American diplomat, keeps uttering encomia like "This sort of thing is worth a million dollars in foreign aid...

...If, however, the point is to ridicule humanity, there must be better ways of doing it than this...

...Mark Robson has directed Nine Hours to Rama with a remarkable lack of imagination and suspense, and the cast walk through their parts, with the exception of Buchholz, who waltzes through his...

...The Premier of Sarkhan (beautifully played by Kukrit Pramoj) is first represented as a sleekly sneaky Oriental, against whom Deong was right to fulminate and rebel...

...Apropos of Baudelaire, Landru comments, "They always call geniuses monsters," and explains that he is saying this "for the sake of posterity...

...a line making its triumphal transit from the bedroom of domestic drama to the arena of the political spectacular...

...He is one part surly, slow-spoken but profound, Brandoish prima donna...

...we get everything from pidgin English to pig Latin...

...and the remaining 96 parts Marlon Brando...

...La Robe mauve de Valentine, is relevant: "By way of bait for her superficial following, Miss Sagan conducts a fashion show with dresses by Dior...

...If you're just absolutely sure, darling," Brando tells his wife (played uninterestingly by Sandra Church), "to keep your mouth shut at all times, you'll be all right...

...originality, to have someone say of him: "He sits there, a lonely, tired, anguished man...

...He himself has no such luck with mouth either shut or open...

...about a small hospital run by Americans) and "You know, this is so like Deong to do something like this...

...Kosher pickle...

...The other principals are conceived with equal ambivalence...

...Against the ancient splendors of India's architecture and scenery, dilapidated commonplaces like "Are you afraid of me?—Then I wouldn't be here.—Of yourself, perhaps...

...If so— take it from one who reviews the drama, too—we've had it...

...one part humbler...

...And, in Arthur Ibbetson's photography, India itself almost justifies seeing the film, especially if one can turn it inside out or, more precisely, backgroundside forward...

...then a mouther of every Communist slogan, who quite rightly cannot be told apart from the Communists...

...There is, first, Claude Chabrol's and Françoise Sagan's collaboration, Landru...

...And the only American who is represented as being authentically and heartily ugly is a very minor figure who gets his just deserts in no time flat...

...The nationalist Deong (played mediocrely by Eiji Okada) is, by turns, a decent, lovable, ordinary guy, as Americanly wholesome beneath his mispronounced "l"-s as any Rodgers-and-Hammerstein hero...

...The only interesting line in the whole movie is the thick brown one visible on the inside of every white collar...

...about a piece of sculpture sent him and his wife as a present...

...I don't care for the cinema any more," remarked the mother in A Taste of Honey, "it's getting more and more like the theater...

...To presume to compete with Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux takes a good deal of arrogance, but in that area both Chabrol and Sagan are amply endowed...

...But whereas the war scenes in Jules et Jim add a dimension to the plot, in Landru they are merely garishly tinted ornamentation...

...I could find no films free from the curse of the ovoid...

...or "Are you an engineer...

...Much the same happens in Landru...

...But wickedness can be made as dreary as sacrosanctness...

...but who must presently become inconsistently ignorant and speak of "that painter—Manot or Monet or Monot...

...Jacques Saulnier has designed almost painfully heady settings, Maurice Albray has created witty and spectacular costumes, and Jean Rabier has photographed them in pastel shades worthy of Renoir père at his lushly stifling best...

...Both scenarios, however, are equally execrable...

...But Landru is not shown as anything nearer to a genius than a wisecracker, nor as anything more charming than Macheath as he might be played at the Théâtre National Populaire, and it is only the other people who are exceedingly slow-witted...

...In The Ugly American, the superb backgrounds shot in and around Bangkok have to contend with the additional sins of pretentiousness and a wavering point of view...

...While the American films concern themselves with men of—however misplaced—good will, the European ones are preoccupied with rascality—however metaphysically contemplated...

...Truly, the gowns have it, for the people are hollow...

...When I saw the motto with which Cesar Ardavin prefaces his film—a quotation from St...

...He is a walking anthology of French poetry from Lamartine to Baudelaire, a sophisticated amateur of opera and bel canto who, when apprehended, bids good-bye to his mistress and love nest with Manon's farewell, "Adieu, notre petite table...

...What this extraordinary story needed was the presence of a Bunuel and the absence of a Franco...

...next as a wise, courageous, generously upright man who alone can avert all-out war...

...Mlle...

...Consider, first, two American films set in exotic places: Nine Hours to Rama, which deals with India and the assassination of Gandhi...

...whereas a gag in Monsieur Verdoux is used economically, in Landru it is milked besides being stolen...

...produce a peculiarly ludicrous and depressing effect...

...What happened to us, Deong...

...But it comes a bit late...

...Both films are based on subliterary novels, but whereas Rama sticks close to the original, American does not...

...Where the book contrasts the greed of the clergy and folly of the gentry with the great physical hunger of the poor which forces them to become rogues to survive, and ends with the poor hero's absurd embourgeoisement, the movie gives us a nice Horatio Alger story in which blows knock out no teeth, the hero is a Murillo cherub rather than a shrewd starveling, priests and monks become sextons and actors impersonating monks, and vices are poorly impersonated by peccadilloes...

...I tried, but I couldn't get you out of my mind," says the hero, a young fanatic who kills Gandhi largely because his married girl friend cannot run away with him instantaneously...

...And typically, Landru's character is sheer manipulation...

...A Spanish import, Lazarillo, based on that marvelously hardheaded, proletarian and picaresque novel of the 1550s, Lazarillo de Tormes, proves only that an amateurish film-maker is no match for Franco's censorship...

...then, again, an honest, noble dupe, taken in and murdered by his own trusted second-in-command...

...Sure enough, none of the novel's robustness, and very little of its irony, survives...

...And what of Ambassador MacWhite's saying to Deong, as they informally eat and get drunk together while, quite informally, settling the future of Sarkhan: "What you got here...

...one part taciturn, tough yet occasionally boyishly exuberant, Brandoish matinee idol...

...Sagan's career of infamy needs no rehearsing here, but Georges Schlocker's comment on her current Parisian play...

...which the subtitles meaninglessly turn into "Adieu to our little tableau...

...but with, of all things, "Are you a poet...

...They are, in fact, insults to the gravity of the events treated, and are, in turn, made ridiculous by the nobility of the backgrounds...

...followed by decomposing platitudes like "Opposites attract...

...George Englund's direction, however, has its moments, especially in a riot scene at the airport when the Ambassador arrives...

...Pancake make-up, by the way, is also working overtime, and all the main Indian characters (except the Mahatma—after all, film crews could get lynched) are played by Americans, Britishers, Canadians, and Horst Buchholz...

...This is not to say that plain bad dialogue isn't abundant, as when Harrison Carter MacWhite (Marlon Brando), our ambassador to Sarkhan, addresses the local nationalist leader, his wartime buddy, with...

...And it is surely a bitter affront to Gandhi's majesty, humility and, above all...

...Everything he says or does is preceded by an almost audible Cape Canaveral-like count-down, and one has the feeling that between his cue and answer there is always time for the proWestern forces to lose at least one blitzkrieg...

...But we cannot, and are not meant to, consider as people the phantasms caught in this trap of color, deliberately dehumanized whether they be murderers or victims, wives or mistresses, policemen or their quarry, and placed on sets often made to resemble the stage of a puppet theater...

...and there are two times when even the screenplay comes to life: during a Senate investigation at the beginning, and again, at the very end, where the first ingenious, psychologically and cinematographically effective point is made...

...lastly as one who has to admit that he did play a game of reactionary nepotism...

...For a banality such as "Your hair is darker and more beautiful than the night," which Amaru or Bhartrihari would have discarded a dozen or more centuries ago, he is rewarded not with "Are you an elephant boy...

...Augustine—I knew the jig was up...