On Screen

...If a fetchingly cleft chin can be called a performance, Schell can be said to act...

...But a comic talent at least the equal of his, Robert Morley's, disappears into the maw of prevailing mediocrity...

...True, but hokum can be fun, as in Beat the Devil which, in its own way, is scarcely inferior to The Asphalt Jungle...

...And the principals are made yet more unbelievable by being Melina Mercouri and Maximilian Schell...

...But Marienbad already was a mere dance of death for an expensive puppet theater, and Muriel was only 13 ways of looking at a vacuum...

...About the central problem the film has nothing to say that has not been said before and better...

...But the literary world emerges only as caricature or a catalog of references from Balzac and Stendhal to Ionesco and Daninos...

...There are almost no funny lines and no funny characters—though Peter Ustinov's Herculean labors to make a standard petty swindler charming almost succeed...

...But this is nowise connected with plot, character, or ideas, for the power that sleekly propels a machine across the screen does not necessarily further our understanding by an inch...

...Even the performances are merely adumbrations...

...Topkapi, however, is merely silly and boring...

...Again, there is absorption in detail for detail's sake without relevance to the whole...

...It might be contended that Rififi was predominantly serious business, whereas this is intended as hokum...

...We must call it cheating...

...The camera movements up and down the recumbent figure, the cross-cutting from avid yet slightly frightened face to rapt fingers gently exploring the texture of a thigh, the chiaroscuro, the rhythms, the ability to suggest the extensiveness, manifoldness, delicacy of a girl's body and the awe rather than mere concupiscence it elicits—these reveal the master...

...They are there, but even they tend to become contaminated or undercut...

...Jules Dassin's new film, Topkapi, unlike other recent works of his, is at least unpretentious...

...Malle scored splendidly with The Fire Within, but it will take more than one bull's-eye to cancel out all those previous misses...

...but whereas in that movie he was cribbing from vintage John Huston, here he is only borrowing from James Bond...

...In Topkapi we all too soon recognize the precarious structure of the fiendishly clever theft exposed by unforeseeable accident, and the people are tawdry ciphers who do not begin to engage us...

...Schell sulks boyishly, smiles boyishly, and waxes boyishly tense...

...The principals of The Soft Skin have the density of mere extras...

...Her standard expression is a bemused, constipated smile which is supposed to convey everything from mysterious female canniness to irrepressible hormones, but manages to suggest only someone trying to look knowing while being talked to in a language he doesn't know a word of...

...But each successive film only underscored Chabrol's mindless pretense at having a mind, his perverse obtuseness in the realm of psychology, and his mistaking of trickery for art...

...As the stewardess, Françoise Dorléac of the hauntingly skull-like head cannot communicate much more than the bare bones of innocent seductivity, though this may be the fault of the script...

...Yet that is the burden of Truffaut's story: The ghastliest disasters stem from the most trivial circumstances...

...In this tale of an elaborate jewel robbery, Dassin returns to his happiest poaching-grounds, the realm of Rififi...

...Left him, that is, until The Soft Skin came along, severely jolting one's faith in him...

...Jean Desailly has the perfect physical equipment for the charming middle-aged weakling—that flabbiness and its concomitants which the French can tidily sum up with veulerie—but he is much less able to convey the desire or need or dazzlement sucking him into the affair...

...That leaves us Raoul Coutaud's customary expert photography and Georges Delerue's economical and functional score...

...There are, moreover, a number of hermetic incidents and statements that seem to be meaningful to Truffaut but are inscrutable to us...

...It is by merest chance that husband and girl meet, purely accidental that anything comes of it, utterly fortuitous that the wife finds out, and sheer rotten luck that the husband's contrite phone call doesn't reach the loving but vengeful wife in time...

...And what of the incidental virtues, the peripheral successes that some have found in The Soft Skin...

...Above all, there is the scene in which the hero toys with and undresses his mistress who simulates sleep...

...But such flashes are few and very far between...

...Godard started out promisingly, but soon revealed himself possessed of spirit rather than imagination, vitality rather than sensitivity, discrimination, or depth...

...But the success was due to a new solution or sharper insight: to the wringing of a keener cry of pain or brighter laughter from the situation...

...In Rififi there was genuine suspense, based on greater probability and reliance on documentary technique, and, more importantly, on characters who were both believable and likable...

...Resnais bore witness to a strange but undeniable sensibility and considerable directorial flair...

...As for Miss Mercouri, her blackly mascaraed eye sockets gape like twin craters, unfortunately extinct...

...Truffaut tries, for example, to show contrasts—as between the phoney world of the man of letters and the simple sensuous existence of the stewardess...

...Truffaut is obviously interested in mechanisms, and so the replenishing of a gas tank and the revolving numbers on the dials of a filling station are photographed with loving accuracy, as are the slow but methodical ascent of an elevator and the darting progress of cars and airplanes...

...Couldn't her dialogue have been dubbed by Katina Paxinou...

...Artists are, of course, fully entitled to occasional blunders in the pursuit of the experimental, but there is less excuse for fiascos of retrogression into the commonplace...

...The one point it belabors is that everything important happens by coincidence...

...It is a banal old story, though French authors—perhaps not the very best ones—have successfully disseminated it on stage, screen and printed page, dramatically, melodramatically, or farcically...

...And the plain wholesomeness of the girl gets no more adequate objective correlatives than her alacrity to jump out of bluejeans into a skirt at the whim of her lover, or her ability to perform in the middle of a crowded dance floor a fairly ludicrous solo love dance which the intellectual lover savors from the uncommitted safety of their nightclub table...

...What follows, though harsh, is written more in sorrow than in anger, and still more in sheer astonishment...

...But one can go only so far on a solitary negative virtue...

...And there are a few moments when Truffaut does capture the hectic corrosiveness of adultery poignantly...

...A game of dice may represent life, but if the dice are loaded by the film-maker, we can no longer call it chance...

...That left François Truffaut, who had always been, at worst, inventive, and, at best, a shattering artist...

...Coincidence is a tired old nag, but even tired nags have been known to win races—not, however, when saddled with the entire weight of the tale...

...In Le beau Serge he was able, at least, to create an atmosphere of pervasive grubbiness, to unmask the French rural milieu as no one but René Clément in Forbidden Games had done it before...

...In The Soft Skin, which Truffaut also co-authored, a middle-aged married writer-editor-lecturer has a clandestine affair with a young airline stewardess, falls in love with her, decides somewhat hesitantly to leave his wife and child, is rejected by the girl who senses his lack of conviction, and is melodramatically shot to death by his wife who discovers the affair...

...But these characters are as hazy as their motivations, and the bitchiness of coincidence, not being pitted against any warm and moving realities, becomes the only reality and thus arbitrary...

...And as the wife, Nelly Benedetti is not given a chance to display anything but her pronounced dark fleshliness...

...Much is made of a pair of sable-colored stockings the hero must procure for the girl, and though the device of the off-screen voice is quite uncharacteristically conjured up for the purpose of impressing on us the importance of the incident (which does, indeed, result in a derisory contretemps), no illumination results from it...

...And speaking of language, what Miss Mercouri does to English shouldn't happen to pig-Latin...

...The invocation of the later Pound is not gratuitous...

...Not so here...

...A whole episode is built up only to enable the girl to inform her lover portentously at its climax that women who wear imitation-leopard blouses are passionate in bed—a bit of éducation sentimentale as irrelevant as it is impugnable...

...Perhaps this is the ineluctable trajectory of innovation, but if so, the New Wave is traversing it with alarming speed...

...And perhaps some life could still be wrested from this notion if the movie were peopled with real and interesting characters upon whom coincidence descended with sinister, brutal stupidity...

...The New Wave is succumbing to a kind of Byzantinism that is no longer making it new, only esoteric, in-group-oriented and self-indulgent...

...Well, the minor ones are just running gags, old enough to be rubbery, but not rubbery enough to stretch to the required length...

...Knowing Truffaut's autobiographical bent, I suspect that these things have a private significance, but they strike me as the filmic equivalents of the tiresome personal references that neatly obfuscate Pound's Cantos...

...Since the material is not such as to make us hold either our sides or our breath, there remain the characters...