On Screen

...Compared to this, America America, third-rate as it is, might seem genuinely second-rate...

...It should give us pause that Doris Day has been, for years, the number one box-office attraction in the American cinema...

...I again attempted to stomach one of her films...

...Lacking the pen of Horatio Alger to do justice to Mr...

...Schary has consistently maintained a level nothing short of subliminal...

...it should start us thinking that her sickening films have been well received by the reviewers...

...The only very real talent Miss Day possesses is that of being absolutely sanitary: her personality untouched by human emotions, her brow unclouded by human thought, her form unsmudged by the slightest evidence of femininity...

...It means that two or three generations of Americans are basking in witlessness and calling it wit, in facelessness and calling it radiance, in sexlessness and calling it sex, in total darkness and calling it Day...

...Nor is the bandit Abdul believable: He might play cat and mouse with his victim, but he would not abdicate the cat's cunning and invite the mouse to outwit him...

...and the healthy sexuality is a coy, protracted game of teases and double-entendres played between husbands and wives or couples well on the way to the altar, and with all ambient beds remaining prelapsarianly unsullied...

...but Yves Robert, the director, himself a very funny comedian, succeeds in making his children childlike, spontaneous and human...

...They also have very little talent, with the possible exception of Alice Playten...

...Schary is responsible for more unmitigatedly awful plays and movies than any other dozen great Broadway and Hollywood names...

...and words without pictures, so that Siegfried may truly be superhuman and not the current paunchy Metropolitan Heldentenor...

...Against my better judgment...

...But with Act One he plumbs depths that one would have thought unattainable by a craft so much lighter than air...

...Now the alleged virtues of Miss Day's persona are three...

...Whether he reduced F.D.R...

...Schary's adaptation of Act One, written, produced and directed by himself, manages to be a vulgarization of a vulgarity...

...Not even into a three-hour movie can one crowd so much incident, social and political history or pseudohistory, and sentimental moralizing posturing as hard-boiled realism, as Mr...

...Schary's staggering want of mind and taste, I can describe Schary only as a man whose few successes were even more distasteful than his many failures...

...It means that until this spun-sugar zombie melts from our screen, there is little chance of the American film's coming of age, whatever delicious shivers may course up and down the spines of Senegal and Sweden...

...Characters do not become convincing...

...What, then, does it mean that this heavily sugarcoated, as well as sugarskinned and sugarboned, pill should coax the largest number of coins from the hands of American moviegoers, from the tiny, sweaty ones of our young to the daintily manicured or virilely hirsute ones of our adults—for only by the conjoint spending of all these hands is one anointed America's number one box-office attraction...

...This, though the scenario is again by François Boyer, is no Forbidden Games...

...is not, as you might expect, about the daughters of President Johnson, but about a bunch of children caught in a supremely improbable atomic-attack scare...

...I am respectfully aware of Griffith and Eisenstein, and admire even Lawrence of Arabia (before the exhibitors chopped some 20 important minutes out of it...

...Ladybug Ladybug (more echolalia...

...And he is no writer, as his screenplay and his book on which it is based prove...

...If one wants to see what can be done with children in the movies, there is a delightful example in The War of the Buttons...

...Not only is the three-way relationship of the Anatolian Turks, Armenians and Greeks presented sketchily, but often one does not even know who is which...

...This abject acclaim of mediocrity wearing Adler Elevators as the height of artistic achievement goes beyond mere bad film-making: It is benightedness so complete it deserves not even scorn, only pity...

...The subject of arrested development brings us quite naturally to Dore Schary...

...the Turkish faces and locations look marvelous...

...to hear George Hamilton (who gives us a Hart inept and inane beyond the call of verisimilitude) say with a modest smile, after a reading of his first farce to a bunch of awestruck amateurs, "It is not perfect yet, but neither was Hamlet at the first reading,"—these are moments not easily forgotten, however much one might wish them to be...

...Though Frank Perry has picked such accomplished adult actors as William Daniels, Jane Connell, Nancy Marchand and several others, his direction is rudimentary, and his wife's script is, if possible, even worse to the adults...

...the radiance is so girlish that it has to be shot through special screens to disguise a bad case of creeping pucker which has begun to ravage that once youthfully insipid face...

...Toward the end, the film becomes tendentious...

...In any case, America America takes after, not the Odyssey, but the Kulevala...

...Films like The Bridge on the River Kwai or The Guns of Navarone are possible, but they are not truly epic in that they concentrate on a single action involving mainly a few characters...

...As anyone who scrutinizes even one of the Day movies will note, the wit is so crisp that, dropped on your head, it produces instant coma...

...But even such rare successes were only partial: What the epic needs is much, much time in which cumulative effects can be obtained...

...the young hero, who will do anything to get to America, does not develop...

...On the other hand, Linda Marsh, Paul Mann, Gregory Rozakis and a few others come through with excellent performances...

...Move Over, Darling, which, yet again, affected me as a cross between an all-day sucker and a hand-painted necktie...

...But the main problem that America America raises is whether there can be such a thing as epic cinema...

...As producer, director, adapter and writer, Mr...

...Things are not improved by the monotonous acting of Stathis Giallelis in the lead and inadequacies in other key performances: Elena Karam's mother (pure Brooklyn), Lou Antonio's bandit (pure Lou Antonio) and Harry Davis' father (pure nothing...

...ON SCREEN By John Simon Infantilism Revisited Possibly the one memorable sentence in Life's recent double issue on the movies read, "When Doris Day puckers up, Senegalese and Swedes feel the touch of her lips...

...The result is a film often muddled or superficial...

...What, I repeat, does this endemic Day-worship mean...

...or Miss Lonelyhearts to his own micrometrie size, whether he gave us the stale gefilte fish of A Majority of One, the cut-rate incense of The Devil's Advocate, or the grass-roots, pioneer platitudes of The Unsinkable Molly Brown, Mr...

...Acting and writing, direction and photography, are on the level of the early Betty Grable movies about the glamor of show business: its little heartbreaks and big brainless triumphs...

...fortissimo, pianissimo...

...Elia Kazan is still another whose growth is arrested, or, more precisely, tripped up by his cleverness and crassness (two sides of the same coin, and I do mean coin) over which he keeps stumbling...

...until then, it gives free vent to the innocent toughness that is the essence of childhood and its inexhaustible charm...

...To aggravate matters, he sometimes overcompensates by slowing down the hectic huggermugger to a virtual standstill (as in the wooing scenes) and throwing the timing further out of joint...

...You have done childhood an injustice," Rilke once wrote the novelist Friedrich Huch, and proceeded to explain that the children in Huch's novel were only miniature adults...

...Even in the book, his ambiguous state of someone who sinks to considerable depravity to achieve a noble end was made clearer and more moving...

...crisp wit, girlish radiance, and healthy sexuality...

...the kind of attention span that can be accorded to listening or reading in installments...

...and there are scenes, like the dumping of killed conspirators into the sea, that are powerful...

...it should make us sit up that a reputable critic on a recent TV show, after knocking some of her films, hastily added that this was not meant to minimize her very real talent...

...The title itself is emblematic: Kazan would always rather say a thing doubly than singly, but, to find time for so much duplication, he must breathlessly hurtle over the decencies of punctuation...

...As I am neither Senegalese nor Swedish, the only thing I feel when Doris Day puckers up—and we shall sooner see America's Sweetheart without her clothes than without her pucker— is nausea...

...The children in Frank and Eleanor Perry's film are not even that, they are diminutive symbols and have almost no reality at all...

...Moss Hart's autobiography is every bit as shallow and trivial as one expects anything of Hart's to be, but, at least, it contains here and there an honest bit of asperity, a confession not doused in Joy, Cheer and (pink) Thrill...

...He is like a composer with four notations...

...What Act One exudes, besides amateurishness and clichés, is imbecile adulation of show business in its grimiest, sleaziest and most ephemeral aspects: groveling before Theatre-as-Success which is automatically equated with Theatre-asGreatness...

...in the film, he remains, despite everything, a lovably ingenuous young fellow...

...To see a crowd of bright-eyed youngsters stream across the screen toward a YMHA stage on which they are about to perform a new play by the young Moss Hart—in a schmaltzy boom shot accompanied by the boom of Skitch Henderson's brashest pop-music score...

...prestissimo, lentissimo...

...The moment you try to tell the story of a whole nation, of a struggle involving vast numbers of people in a prominent way, or, as in America America, have an eponymous hero embodying all the strivings and hardships of all immigrants ever—the film no longer is a receptive medium...

...Kazan crams into America America...