FROM STAGE TO SCREEN

...As long as there is love, there is hope...

...It is his obvious joy at the happiness he is able to bring to others that is the most convincing argument for the continuance of the happiness of the happy ending...

...Burt Lancaster is sufficiently oafish as the truckdriver-suitor but misses the comic pathos Eli Wallach brought to the part on the stage...

...Marisa Pavan deftly counterstates the blossoming vitality of the adolescent daughter to the widow's overweening negations...

...Tennessee Williams' first visit to Italy a few years ago brought a discovery of the virtues of sexual vitality—a subject for drama that is more salutary, at least, than the orchidaceous decadences of most of his plays and stories...

...The touch is so dramatically effective, one wonders that Shakespeare did not think of it...

...The device of speaking Richard's soliloquies as confidences to the audience is quite in keeping with a conception of his schemes, conspiracies, and variegated maleficences as matters for mutual enjoyment...

...Williams affirms the life force among the Italians of the Gulf Coast with parvenu enthusiasm, but with the subtly patronizing air of a sophisticate making folk idioms culturally respectable...

...III The last thing one should say about Shakespeare's Richard III is that it all may not be true...

...From Stage to Screen By MARTIN S. DWORKIN SINCE the cinema's beginning in the closing years of the last century the screen has turned to the stage as the natural source for its material—one consequence of which is that it is always possible to get up an article or two joining and comparing the various plays currently transposed to films...

...But when John Gielgud reads Clarence's lines, it seems again, as in Julius Caesar and the short Hamlet excerpts, that here is the only actor in films who hears the music in Shakespeare's speech...

...She ranges from great, baroque rages to delicacies of feeling, at once comprising ferocious dignity and pathetic vulgarity, with a force and depth no other actress can match today...

...In the film, the picnic also dominates the dramatic situation—but here it does so in fact...

...In the Hollywood style, these are happy outcomes, rather than portents of problems to come...

...The play surely is one of Shakespeare's lesser works in profundity of theme or characters...

...In James Wong Howe's remarkable Technicolor photography, it is rhapsodic rather than reportorial, com-mentarial rather than documentary, with a current of humor that is not above visual punning, such as coun-terposing the pomposities of an orator to a baby's mugging and yowling in full-screen close-up...

...The film is something of a test case, being simultaneously released theatrically and over television...

...But of the histories it is easily the most theatrical, and offers Olivier his best opportunity as actor and director...

...After the nightmares preceding the final battle, in which the ghosts of Richard's victims foredoom his downfall, the doubts crowding his thoughts in the morning are dispelled in a moment, as Olivier, signifying the King's upsurging hopes as well as his unrepentance, takes the audience into his confidence again, remarking in an aside: "Richard's himself again...

...But on the screen—and especially in the enlarged frame, filled with rich colors—this very apathy of the soldiers and confusion of the struggle ought to have been made more dramatic: emphasized, rather than allowed to impart its almost lackadaisical rhythm to the film's concluding sequences...

...The role of the widow fiercely withdrawing from life in her grief was written originally for Miss Magnani, and her performance is characteristically operatic...

...The battle sequence at the close, however, seems unduly erratic in its development towards the climax of Richard's death—quite in contrast to the memorable force of the Agincourt sequence in Olivier's Henry V. This weakness may stem first of all from the fact that the actual battle of Bosworth Field surely must have been as indifferently-fought a conflict as ever overthrew a king—a circumstance of history reflected in the almost perfunctory close Shakespeare gives the play...

...But a wholly charming surprise is Kim Novak as the belle who gives up status and security with the son of the local tycoon, for the romance and indeterminate happiness that the braggart can promise...

...But the film, like the play, succeeds only in particularizing it to a tribute to the gregariously temperamental Italian nature, especially as it is incarnated in Anna Magnani...

...But if this seems momentarily tedious, one may be able to look at a play or two from the current, popular stage, and then at that particular drama of Shakespeare's which is being brought to the screen at the moment, to make the perennial discovery that Shakespeare makes the best scenarist after all, give or take a filmic liberty or two with his classic text...

...One may always comment upon the essential differences between stage and screen—which are truly important, and may be ignored only if we are content to accept uncritically a medium which, as A. Nicholas Vardac has said, ". . . by doing so much better the selfsame things which had been the aim and objective of the Popular Nineteenth Century theater, became the most widely patronized and effective art force in the world, the prime source of popular entertainment, as well as one of the most powerful propaganda weapons ever [placed] in the hands of men...

...One of the textual emendations stands out as truly inspired—whether it is Olivier's, or one of Garrick's or Cibber's that has come down to us...

...If anything, being able to see the picnic's vigor and color is an advantage over the play...

...But he is manifestly older and worldlier than the boy he is playing—a fact especially noticeable in his scenes with the grown-ups in the film...

...But the other characters are unreal people wearing exaggerated masks...

...But such enormous size of personality inevitably breaks out of so small a story...

...In the case of the aging schoolteacher, the last hope for anything but a desiccated future of the companionship of others like herself in the little Kansas town lies with the fussy but good-hearted bachelor she manages to rope in—a union of old maids and rigid habits, in contrast to the younger couple's joining of exuberances and inexperiences...

...The image of Richard in our folklore is Shakespeare's: a deformed, dishonorable, relentlessly evil usurper, guilty of the most heinous treacheries, and deserving of the everlasting hisses of the multitude...

...In 'any case, there is quality enough for both theater and television screens to share in presentation...

...Olivier's rearrangements and editing of the text, with the counsel of Alan Dent, are generally advantageous to the film—except, perhaps, the omission entirely of the character of Queen Margaret, with her bitter denunciations of both the Yorkist and Lancastrian factions, which make the latter seem far less the innocent and righteous victims of Richard's plots...

...But the story that revolves around it remains no more than a pleasant contrivance, affirming what is, after all, a familiar cliche of romantic melodrama...

...II In the stage production of William Inge's Picnic, the Labor Day celebration was never seen—but prepared for, talked about, and returned from, a ritual of belonging rendered somewhat abstractly, in contrast to the actualities shown...

...And yet, it must be said—if not as a statement of literary or dramatic criticism, then as a warning that the truth itself cannot prevail over art, which makes its own measures of true and false...

...Olivier shares them with us, playing the archetypal villain in the manner, leveling evil to comedy, that must have, in Shakespeare's own day, set those in the pit or mn-yaid to knowing laughter and nodding foreknowledge of just deserts...

...In the case of the young, athletic braggart, forever pouring on the charm, blustering from one failure to another—almost repeated in the near-disasters he precipitates during and after the picnic, redemption lies in romance with the town belle, who goes off to join him in a new start towards meaningful purpose...

...The Rose Tattoo attempts to generalize this discovery to something beyond its importance in Williams' biography...

...But perhaps Olivier is correct in seeking manageability on the screen in sheer melodrama, sacrificing history that is partisan at best, and forgotten for most...

...It is this most unequivocal and therefore satisfying villain of popular melodrama whom Laurence Olivier has now incarnated in film, in what may be the most enjoyable transcription of Shakespeare to the screen...

...Director Joshua Logan is to be commended for the evocation of her performance, upon which much of the film's end-of-summer quality depends...

...Director Joshua Logan's interpolation of the speeches, games, contests, dances, and other festivities has a unity and autonomy of its own...

...As the small-town merchant who is finally snared as her husband, Arthur O'Connell gives what may be the best performance in the picture, repeating his stage portrayal...

...But there is a kind of oddly satisfying appositeness about the comparison of juxtaposition, however fortuitous it may be, when one considers how much has been made of the two modern works, in our industrial mills of evanescent fame, and how much more truly the fanfare now greeting the new reading of Richard III is deserved, today or any other...

...There is no question but that many of the film's visual qualities may be missed on the small, black-and-white screens at home...

...Her sensuous beauty, seen previously in torchy roles, here is fresh and exquisite, almost sleepily voluptuous, edging her romantic awakening with a sweet poignance...

...The subtlety and insight of his performance can best be judged by noting how much of Olivier's projection of Richard's grandiose evil is balanced by Buckingham's measured complicity...

...The association of, say, the Tennessee Williams of The Rose Tattoo, and the William Inge of Picnic, with the Shakespeare of Richard III is merely topical, with little intrinsic significance, beyond the reiterated proof of the perennial vigor of the latter, even in his minor works...

...At least, there is left the pleasure of watching her runaway with everything...

...Director Daniel Mann tries to contain Magnani's force within the trivial directions of the plot, but his need to dramatize the talk makes him give her her head...

...Technically, the film is superbly photographed by Otto Heller, and generally well edited by Helga Cranston...

...Only historians care whether Richard Crookback perpetrated the villainies attributed to him, or whether his memory has been perpetually maligned by the persistence of Lancastrian slanders...

...Rosalind Russell is driving and shrill as the schoolteacher, dissolving to a desperation that is pungently drawn—indicating her potentialities as a character actress for what can be a new career...

...In effect, however, the latter showing may work out as a kind of preview— the best use of which may be in affording a chance to read along in the text of the play...

...William Holden is very skillful as the young braggart...

...Claire Bloom as Lady Anne, Cedric Hardwicke as Edward IV, Mary Kerridge as Queen Elizabeth, Alec Clunes as Hastings, and Laurence Naismith as Stanley are excellent...

...The Vistavision framing in Technicolor imbues many scenes with just the grandeur and pageantry to make Richard's machinations appear all the blacker...

...Betty Field as the mother and Susan Strasberg as the adolescent sister bring sensitivity and depth to roles which are written more as types than persons...

...As Buckingham, Ralph Richardson is masterly...

...She provides the necessary continuity from the preceding three parts of King Henry VI, whose course of action, at least, needs to be known for most of Richard III to be comprehensible, as far as the significance of its intrigues, alliances, and murders is concerned...

...But there is more to be seen, heard, and enjoyed in this Richard III than has to be swallowed in one sitting...