IN DUBIOUS BATTLE

...However appalling the casualty figures running along the electrical band may be, in the end we can no longer respond keenly to the one-dimensional satire (particularly when combined with sentimentality about the little man), and more and more we find ourselves responding to the foolish ballads rather than to the flagging bite...

...Shaking the dust of the Seventh Festival off my mind, let me turn to some other recent films, permitting me to put the dust right back on...

...The comedian reads his lines by Anhalt out of Maurice Valency's adaptation of Giraudoux, and what the Kaye-Anhalt-Valency trio does to the late playwright can be described only as a necrophilic gang bang...

...One worker in particular seems to be the mainstay of this quiet, dignified strike...

...Kjell's brave mother and her children begin to adjust to their loss...

...Anna's father tries to apologize for the abortion to the enraged Kjell...

...so are the hero's best friend and three other people...

...Bertie Smith is a subaltern officer, the others are noncoms and enlisted men, and through them we see life at the front in a curiously ambivalent way: much of the simulated horror of war, but no on-screen deaths...

...This is also one of those films awash with stars and near-stars, and there is many a commanding cameo performance, as well as excellent work by newcomers...

...The first of these was Jaromil Jires' The Joke, about which I will write when it is released...

...a final helicopter shot of a rolling emerald plain studded with numberless dazzling white crosses, which, say what you will, is a heart-breakingly magnificent sight...

...That is a crude outline...

...What a Lovely War is ultimately a naive, sentimental, populist affair, using many (too many) clever devices yet making the same old simplistic statements...

...Of the younger generation, Joe Melia, as the M.C., has the best part, but all are fine...

...The name of Auguste Renoir is often invoked in it, and Widerberg is a sort of filmic Renoir: not the Renoir of the sugary salon paintings, but the artist who took chances?who told Vollard that "there's not a single process, no matter how insignificant, which can be reasonably made into a formula...

...The mystery is how, in his middle period, Renoir was able to make two or three respectable films, and, above all, that masterpiece, The Rules of the Game (1939...

...It is now fashionable to say that Richard Attenborough's film version of Joan Littlewood's musical revue misses the bite of the original...

...We are in the heart of that long-awaited, shortlived North-Country summer...

...Widerberg's Elvira Madigan was a ravish-ingly beautiful film with a scenario that was barely mediocre, except for its strong last scene...

...Like Hans Koningsberger's paltry novel on which it is based, the screenplay (by the novelist himself) is one of those gratuitous exercises in viewing the past with the eyes of the present...

...This tale of the Hundred Years' War is about as medieval as Erich Maria Remarque, full of enlightened liberalism condescending to the Middle Ages while, in the same breath, drawing significant parallels to our own time...

...Milton Moses Ginsberg, if it had not received laudatory notices in certain high-toned journals like Life and the Saturday Review...

...the accent, some ghastly culture-surrogate belonging to no class...

...When you think of the great Marguerite Moreno who created the role, and then look at this performance, exact replicas of which have already earned Miss Hepburn two ill-deserved Oscars, you may wish to forsake the auditorium for the vomitorium...

...As a result of the Adalen affair, Sweden goes Socialist but, as an ironic closing note states, true Socialism has still not prevailed...

...He is the father of the youthful hero, Kjell, who is conducting an innocent affair with Anna, the daughter of one of the mill owners...

...They and their young chums lead reasonably normal lives while the grownups plot and counterplot...

...Kjell's father, the very man who always counseled reason, is killed...

...But we do get a buoyant feeling for nature-the way flowers and greenery are always there between clashing men...

...Everything would be lovely if the workers in the sawmills were not on strike?not even for a raise, only against a proposed wage cut...

...Sweden, 1931, the small Northern town of Adalen...

...and there is army humor of every sort, some of it even funny...

...It purports to deal with the crack-up of a psychiatrist as photographed by a camera the good doctor himself has hidden so that it can catch the action on a nonpsychiatric couch where most of his couplings, as well as his coming apart, conveniently take place...

...there is very respectable color photography by Gerry Turpin...

...Though the film has a modicum of authenticity in its mise en scene, this is achieved at the expense of keeping everything down to a beg-gardly minimum, so that a castle seems to have no servants in it, and a peasant rebellion comprises barely enough people for a third-rate tourney...

...But the Festival also, for one of its sideshows, dredged up the oeuvre of Renoir fits, the filmmaker Jean Renoir, rapturously extolled by a?e«r-critics everywhere, and, indeed, by normal critics as well...

...the face, smug and expressionless, fitting this film to dismal perfection...

...So too about Rene Allio's Pierre & Paul...

...The staging of that scene, including one brief closeup in which the soubrette suddenly looks like a painted image of death, is comic and pathetic and pointed-If only the whole film were more like it...

...But mostly there are compassionate scenes of family and community living under stress, and plain, amiable vignettes of everyday incidents...

...others, like Olivier, Richardson, Redgrave, Robert Flemyng, do not miss a trick...

...The third horror is Forbes' unattractive and untalented wife, Nanette Newman, in the ingenue role that she is, moreover, far too old for-especially opposite Richard Chamberlain, whose pretty face is as unblemished as a newborn calf's...

...Then there is Danny Kaye as the Ragpicker, a part created by Louis Jouvet...

...There is a refreshing touch of anti-clericalism in a front-line church service scene, and there are some good tearjerking effects...

...Three particular horrors must be noted...

...A host of dreary or demented women in various stages of disrobe-ment and psychic disarray conduct clumsy dialogues and fornications with our hero, who sounds and acts not quite bright enough for a village veterinarian, let alone a hip shrinker...

...But how in that same middle period a man could make turkeys like La Marseillaise and Diary of a Chambermaid and the wondrous La Regie du jeu, only the ai/few-critics can explain, and their explanations are less clear than what they explicate...

...He edits his film with a deceptive leisureliness inside which excitement and pathos slowly ripen to burst forth like horse chestnuts from their husks...

...Kaye's delivery is slow, heavy, oily...

...and there are the music and the performances...

...While Adalen '31 seems to me only halfway up Widerberg's ascent to cinematic importance, it is not a film to be dismissed lightly...

...The movie Oh...

...First, the casting of Katharine Hepburn as Aurelia, the Madwoman...

...The performances are amateurish, ranging from Sally Kirkland's unhinged exhibitionism to Viveca Lindfors' narcissistic attitudinizing, perfect subjects for a genuine psychiatrist...

...a good deal of antiheroics but also quite a bit of heroics...

...for innocent young lovers?the way Kjell's and Anna's affair is neither patronized nor prettified...

...Typically, such mental illness as a woman's intense masochism is treated as a big joke, whereas we are to view the psychic maunderings of the hero, played by Rip Torn as a hallucinated Texas cracker, with infinite concern...

...Her Aurelia is all huskily doddering sexiness and girlish flutters, senior division...

...Except here the contrast works because it is more than a lyrical-pathetic setting for a sob story: Natural beauty becomes an eloquent reproach to the unnatural injustices in man's life...

...Without doubt the most execrable of these is The Madwoman of Chaillot, screenplay by Edward Anhalt (Hollywood's resident saboteur of French drama?remember his version of Anouilh's Becketl) and direction by Bryan Forbes, a slick and arty director, who here does not even manage slickness...

...for humble tasks-the way washing windows together brings the grieving family back into the routine of living...

...There are sentimental and bombastic scenes-enemies fraternizing in no-man's-land on Christmas Day, nurses intoning the-pity-of-it-all soliloquies...

...Whereas the show was a collection of skits and song-and-dance numbers, the film (the adaptation, by the way, is credited to no one) tries for something grander, which is to say, easier: It invents a rudimentary plot, tracing a quasi-eponymous Smith family's involvement in World War I. We still get world politics as a parlor game on Brighton Pier, the Army and the War as a carnival show, the General Staff as a bunch of infantile intriguers sometimes literally leapfrogging over one another...

...Already released is the third in this category, Oh...

...Miss Hepburn's quality was and will be that of an offbeat, madcap debutante, and she has now simply entered the emerita division of the same category...

...Sad because these Renoir films, or those I could sit through, emerged, with one or two exceptions, trivial, banal, sentimental and mindless, and composed the portrait of a vastly overrated petit-maitre: a plodding, simple-minded, stagy director, a man with an infantile vision and wobbly style, capable of perpetrating such atrocities as Nana (1926) and The Little Match Girl (1928) in his early period, and such doddering foolishnesses as French Cancan (1955) and Le Testament du Doc-teur Cordelier (1961) in his late...

...and one funny and frightful sequence at a patriotic vaudeville show that ends with a chanteuse (brilliantly played by Maggie Smith) recruiting gullible civilians by the dozen...

...Some of the veterans disappoint-gielgud, John Mills, Kenneth More...

...It would hardly be worth reviewing a piece of pretentious juvenile pornography called Coming Apart by one (or is it two...

...Just as Anna is hustled off by her mother to Stockholm to have an abortion, the bosses call in the Army, There is a bloody confrontation...

...A misguided film, flounderingly directed by a superb actor, with some fringe benefits...

...What a Lovely War-an essentially bad film, yet worth seeing for certain ancillary reasons...

...Other scenes, like those surrounding the massacre, are carefully staged and composed, yet they too preserve the element of unpredictability and surprise, as if the actors never knew what would happen next, or what hit them...

...And, of course, the swinish cowardice and incompetence of upper-class generals and the noncombatant rich (all perfect bloody rotters), and the bloody marvelous decency of the common soldier, whether English or German...

...I understand his stumbling on partial success in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange with the help of Jacques Prevert's dialogue and Jules Berry's sparkling performance, or in The Grand Illusion with the help of a brilliant set of actors: Gabin, Fres-nay, von Stroheim, and Dalio...

...A scene may be effectively improvised -as when Kjell's father argues with the young roughnecks among the strikers, or when the boy's little brother (played by Widerberg's son) is allowed to be a genuine child on screen...

...What a Lovely War is a sedulous kind of fun that keeps lapsing into dread earnest, but must always stop short of letting anyone bite the dust...

...There are those three good scenes and one or two others almost as good...

...The ending of the picture is an absolute botch, and there is a perfectly blank, supremely inept performance in the feminine lead by Huston's daughter, Anjelica, who has the face of an exhausted gnu, the voice of an unstrung tennis racket, and a figure of no describable shape...

...The two genuinely worthy films of the festival were Ermanno Olmi's One Fine Day, which I'll review on its release, and Bo Widerberg's Adalen '31, already showing...

...Huston has directed in a bored and lackluster fashion, and his performing of a minor role is deplorably leprechaunish...

...In its view of politics and tragedy, the film is less than profound or even sophisticated...

...but we also get realistic scenes of trench warfare, field hospitals, railway stations with trains disgorging the wounded, and so on...

...Widerberg, who once again wrote his own script, has a warm regard for people that only rarely goes soft, and a mirthful eye for human absurdities that never lapses into the voyeuristic...

...Fine, too, are Widerberg's period sense, previously demonstrated in such films as Raven's End and Elvira Madigan, and his judicious, inventive camera placements-Study, for example, Anna's and her mother's drive to the station through the strife-torn town...

...There is hunger skulking about, but also a spirit of true comradeship...

...There are scenes of charming humor (Kjell's friend trying to seduce girls by means of hypnotism) and of sharp insight (a drunken Army officer being thrown out by the mill owners following the massacre accuses them of washing their hands off the Army after it has done their dirty work...

...All sorts of cinematic tricks are used in conjunction with the stationary camera, but nothing can disguise the vulgar and ostentatious mind misinforming the picture...

...The director gets delightful and humane performances from both professionals and amateurs in his cast, from adults and children alike...

...This is even truer of the film...

...Scabs are brought in but are beaten down by the strikers...

...And the songs, delightful in their cajoling and cocky ways, but, overorchestrated in the film, less satire than things to be stirred by...

...The level of the invention is best conveyed by the fact that members of the Communist party are usually shown wearing a red garment...

...We were treated to an exhaustive Renoir retrospective, which proved one of my saddest and most mysterious moviegoing experiences...

...At the time of the show's Broadway appearance, I wrote in the Hudson Review: ". . . what might have been mordant as a taut, 10-minute revue sketch cannot begin to make sense as a mellow evening's entertainment...

...Adalen '31 uses the same device of telling a depressing story based on facts in exquisite surroundings photographed (by the same Jorgen Persson) in colors that sing out from the screen...

...only slightly less disastrous a film is John Huston's A Walk with Love and Death...

...One of Giraudoux's less good and most fragile plays has been rewritten, bloated with inept contemporary references, drawn out to gigantic proportions of humorless vacuity, peopled with a barrelful of nonacting stars (Yul Brynner, Paul Henreid, John Gavin, Richard Chamberlain) and others who are miscast or not given a chance...

...Three scenes are gripping: a pacifist speech by the suffragette Emily Pankhurst, splendidly delivered by Vanessa Redgrave...

...Through all this we are invited to follow the fortunes of the large, emblematic Smith family-Its fighting men, its waiting and working women, its bemused or blissfully uncomprehending children...

...There is something of the child about him, with all that entails of naivete and oversimplification, but also of purity and unfettered fancy...