ON THE SCENT OF LAUGHTER

...The new soldier's training as an interpreter of Japanese is duly utilized in a secret project requiring German...

...Brundage had Mr...

...Wee Geordie is a delightful example...

...The civilian, Ian Carmichael, is a frantic idiot...

...There is something about each shot: a savoring of everything to be seen, that is like the rolling of fine, old liquor—Scotch whisky, of course—on the tongue...

...An ideal escape with so little laughter in it surely bespeaks an ill-tempered generation's repudiation of serious concern about the world and what they do and do not want in it...

...The classic movie category of comedies is notably overlooked...

...The opening landscapes, and the faint skirling of pipes seem to give a sense of the very air of the land that persists throughout—surely an outstanding example of atmospheric cinematography...

...In a way, the real trouble may not be with this satire of big business and small stockholders, but with the fact that it is the only one to come along in a long time...

...If movie audiences are seeking escape, as the prevalent theory asserts, the largest, youngest segment wishes to shun not their elders' economic, political, and ethical anxieties of everyday living, but the comforting satieties of television entertainment...

...We may expect too much from it, just because it has so little in it...

...then horror melodramas and fantasies about gruesome monsters and terrors of other worlds...

...And a considerable number of people—somewhat older, surely, than the militantly passive enthusiasts for films such as Rock Around the Clock and Teen Age Crime Wave—still want to laugh...

...There is a once-upon-a-timeness in its telling, for all that the story's climactic focus is on the Melbourne Olympics this year...

...Paul Douglas is generally amiable as the honest industrialist whose romance with Miss Holliday coincides with his struggle to throw crooked directors out of his company...

...Its makers belong, and their ridicule is done with due affection—perhaps somewhat too generalized for the achievement of great comedy...

...His military education is with a group of conscientious malingerers, instigated by Richard Attenborough—and commanded by a gap-toothed, bristle-mustached cartoon Major, Terry-Thomas, who is a master of military futility himself...

...One producer of noisome double-features, such as Hot Rod Girl and Girls In Prison, was reported in Variety as reminding the movie industry that the principal, persistent patrons of theaters—especially the open-air, automobile auditoriums— are the aggressively precocious offspring of the World War II years...

...The enthusiasm with which it has been received, in fact, may be of a kind one may feel for familiar relations—when one's family is small...

...The "British comedy" has become something of a perennial export to the American market...

...or, when he greets his muscle mentor, Francis de Wolff, in a crowded railroad station, with such impact that sundry ordinary-sized pedestrians are nearly pulverized...

...The comedy it intends is more modest and provincial than that of Private's Progress, yet succeeds in greater measure...

...Private's Progress, however, has none of the bitterness of the satire of alienation...

...Judy Holliday, under Richard Quine's direction, does make something amusing of the principal role that is quite different from Josephine Hull's original comic creation...

...The room for intelligent, penetrating satire within such an area of interest would seem to be enormous...

...In the past two years, there have been a number of significant movie treatments of the inner life of great corporations: Executive Suite, Woman's World, Patterns, The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit, and The Power and the Prize...

...Good comedies are always hard to find—and the seeking can be a sad business, as we try to follow the scent of the pun-gently humorous amidst the malodorous manufactures of the automatic ha-ha mills...

...British official eyebrows must have risen at such irreverence towards so recent, and hence so hallowed, a war effort...

...Sniffing out an American film that tries to be a comedy with some success may put one's nose out of joint with the effort...

...This is to be expected, of course, as Congreve had one of his Restoration wits remark: "He that follows his Nose always, will very often be led into a Stink...

...There is no denying the laughs it does get...

...Again, when one does arrive, its rarity alone appears to overwhelm its other qualities, so as to make it seem funnier than it is...

...Malleson's role to play—for real...

...Collectively, they may be said to signify a profound concern on the part of the public, which has its primary expression outside the theatres, of course...

...When Private's Progress, for example, arrived in mid-summer, it did draw some restrained appreciation of its pleasantly farcical attitude towards British Army life and training, and the dubious activities of some genteelly disreputable brass-hats to turn World War II to their own profit...

...The Solid Gold Cadillac would be expected to excite anticipation, being made from a long-run stage success...

...The cheapest way to make a big picture, in fact, may be to take a service theme, and get the Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marines to supply personnel, material, locale, and other facilities and assistance— all at the public's own expense, in the interest of public relations...

...Maybe counting noses in the movie theaters has much to do with immediate reasons for this...

...The British, of course, have helped the happiness of their breed with their comedies—materially as well as spiritually...

...An extra chuckle may be gained in recalling several occasions when Mr...

...The film is a precise spoof of all the glorifications of this service or that, which the movies traditionally make with lavish official encouragement...

...then vehicles for mixtures of rock-'n-roll rhythms and stories of adolescents whom they vicariously recognize as themselves...

...Wee Geordie was produced, written, and directed by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder—another of those teams of film makers, like the Boultings, which seem more common and constant in Britain, and thereby may make possible a greater consistency...

...Tempered praise, however, was drowned in an upsurge of acclaim as the "funniest film," and more, which set off a long first run— that still continues, and is deserved despite the magnification of the comedy's qualities...

...But in a time when good humor, particularly about serious matters, is held in bad odor, the very quantity of attempts to be funny has diminished...

...But Scotland itself: the glens, the lochs, the cool stately woods, and heathery hills, are so lyrically photographed by Wilkie Cooper as to carry one awa...

...This group, demanding something "different" to justify its flights from the home ties of television, apparently favors films of violent action first of all...

...Several scenes achieve a farcical hilarity, and there are a few exuberances of sheer slapstick—as when Geordie, played by Bill Travers, barely misses the laird, Alastair Sim, with a mighty heave of a hammer...

...As the most prominent among the latter, John Williams, Fred Clark, and Hiram Sherman contribute differing, complementary comic characterizations...

...The same may be said for all the comedies that are merely good enough for laughs— especially when they are so rare, as are all occasions for laughter in the world today...

...Above all, however, is the pervading sense of Scotland...

...In this case, director and producer John and Roy Boulting have pictured some monumental military absurdities on a small scale...

...Without laboring the fabulous, or becoming cute, the film achieves a certain sense of a fairy tale...

...Many traditional attributes of Scottish character are firmly, yet gently nudged in the ribs...

...The producers of Private's Progress boast that they "gratefully acknowledge the official cooperation of absolutely nobody," and it is soon apparent why...

...The humor is broad, rather than profound—and yet, the laughter is deeply enjoyed, within the general atmosphere of pleasure which the film creates...

...We are given all the elements of the typical service epic, from the in duction of the raw civilian to his transformation into a soldier and participation in a crucially victorious operation...

...One especially delicious bit is contributed by Miles Malleson, as a British Olympic official confronted —and defeated—by the giant Scotsman's insistence upon wearing his father's Black Watch kilt rather than the official uniform...

...The need for it may be desperate and vital...

...As we laugh, we need only reflect upon the rarity or even improbability of such humor on our screen, to comprehend the appeal of the film—here as well as in Britain...

...And yet, only rarely does anything appear that we may take as a cliche deferential toward dollar clarity and acceptability...

...Certain conventions have grown in their laughing at themselves for others to see...

...Abe Burrows' screen adaptation of the play by George S. Kaufman and Howard Teichman has a lot of dialogue humor and occasions for comic business—as well as gags for George Burns' mostly gratuitous off-screen narration...

...But the story of the play and the film, about the triumph of the small stockholders led by Miss Holliday, has very little weight, even for light comedy...

...A brief shot of the American team parading at the Olympics, taken from actual footage, probably of the Helsinki games, shows Avery Brundage leading our delegation of officials...

...There is also a pachydermous pursuit by a Danish lady shot-putter, Doris Goddard, which is good for smiles, as is Geordie's first, foremost, and ultimate romance with Norah Gorsen...

...The details, however, are delightfully warped...

...But while it does have the authentic recognizability of a good commodity, like British tweeds, its producers have resisted the temptation to turn it out by the yard...

...The film tells a simple story, of an undersized laddie who takes up body building, and what with exercise and natural growth becomes a giant who finally wins the hammer throw at the Olympic Games...

...It exemplifies, too, the characteristic of British comedies —from which they derive much of their power—of placing the voice of its humor precisely in a particular time, a superbly represented place, and fondly drawn characters...

...For all the enjoyment we may derive from what it does have to offer, we may resent the success of The Solid Gold Cadillac, as, in what may be another demonstration of Gres-ham's Law, it drives the possibility of other, better satires of big business out of circulation...

...the comic is only interpolated attemptedly to relieve the violent, horrible, and rhythmic monotonies...

...Laughing, even at poor humor, is a more active form of participation than clenching one's fists in imitation of imaginary fury...

...And this brainstorm of his gold-braided goldbrick uncle, Dennis Price, is really a blind for a caper to privately liberate some art treasures among a lot of German loot...