SHORT STORIES

...The Bespoke Overcoat is an adaptation, by Wolf Mankowitz, of the famous story, The Overcoat, by Nico-lai Gogol...

...That there can be such power in the variety made possible by the short story collection form would seem another vindication of its adoption with greater frequency in the theatrical cinema...

...The Italian version vividly pictorial-ized Gogol's bitter representation of poverty, and its deterioration of a man's worth and dignity as he starves to try to obtain an overcoat to cover his shamefully ragged clothing and his freezing body...

...There may be too much sentimental contrivance in the revelation that the prospective bride is crippled—and that the groom, hitherto appearing to be a boorish oaf, is actually the most sensitive of them all to the fact that their marriage must rest upon affection, as well as upon property arrangements...

...The acting of De Sica as the nobleman, and Piero Bilancioni as the boy, is exquisitely comical and poignant...

...What there is to this may be no more than another occasion for the superb hamming of Vittorio De Sica—and this is sufficient...

...It has little place, too, for short fiction—although there really is no established, constant duration for a "feature-length" film...

...Again, an overcoat represents the ultimate indivisibility of physical necessity and spiritual dignity...

...The narrative force of the short story must be relieved, if more stories are to be told...

...or hung on a storyteller's line, as in the American Decameron Nights...

...The first story tells of a moment of true, if inadvertent education, as a pretty young girl, Anna Maria Ferrero, meets her teacher of Greek in the morning, and tries to trick him into passing her in the course—then desperately changes her mind, when she learns that he is going blind, and will henceforth see her prettiness and her character only in memory...

...And some, including a few of the most successful, simply put together selections of interesting, various, and essentially unrelated tales—although a unitary principle may be introduced gratuitously, as in the American The Story of Three Loves or Face to Face, the Italian Times Gone By, and the famous Franco-Italian Ways of Love, cut down to three stories for U.S...

...In one, the absurdity of friendship and hospitality when they become tyrannical is made deliciously comic, as a paterfamilias, played with a cunning flair by the celebrated Toto, finally usurps the governance of his own household from his guest and boarder, a gangster...

...The point is not to disparage the respectable problems of showmen, but to put them, for a moment, in their place...

...The manner in which this is expressed, however, amounts to a series of bitter disparagements of Europeans...

...War and Peace runs slightly less than three and one half hours...

...The Gold of Naples offers four stories adapted from a single author, Giusseppe Marotta—all directed by Vittorio De Sica, who appears him-relf in one of them...

...Much of the power of the stories of The Roots is in their thematic naivete, that demands recognition of its validity in the face of a civilization whose most salient virtue is its mere sophistication...

...The famous character actor Eduardo De Filippo is seen all too briefly as a negotiator on the girl's behalf...

...A Western melodrama, designed for the bottom of a double bill, may run an hour or thereabouts...

...In it, we are shown how a little boy, cruelly persecuted by other children because he is blind in one eye, is granted a "miracle" at a religious festival, when an exploding fijjecracker takes his sight away completely—thereby making it possible for him to be pitied, rather than ridiculed...

...the aging archaeologist madly infatuated with a young Indian girl, offering to improve the Indian breed by buying the "filly" from her father, are all plainly contemptible people...

...The other stories are essentially short, and hence can be thought of as not being made into films at all, to our loss...

...The entertainment cinema traditionally has little place for lengthy non-fiction— such as the "documentary" film essay, which flowered in 1922, magnificently, with Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North...

...This could leave more room on the screen for short stories, whether presented alone, like The Bespoke Overcoat, or in collections of around typical feature length, like The Gold of Naples, It Happened in the Park, and The Roots...

...The Bespoke Overcoat illustrates, in addition, how much trouble a good short film can give exhibitors who care enough about persuading people to come to the theaters to worry about arranging intelligently balanced programs...

...The old Jewish clerk in the London clothing warehouse, and his friend, the tailor who begins to make for him the overcoat that has come to mean his worth in the world—as warmth is and symbolizes life—are vital, memorable people...

...the stupidly arrogant lady anthropologist studying the Indians by caressing her preconceptions about their primitive "savagery...

...The film mal^ffi impassioned attack upon the cruo|j of bureaucratic impersonality...

...It is significant, however, that the story that least counterposes the ennobled primitive Indian virtues to presumptive European evil is the best in the collection...

...It is interesting to note that Alberto Lattuada made a full-length movie of the, same story, with a script by Cesare Zavattini and starring comedian Renato Rascel, that was shown here three years ago...

...In another, the ostentatiously physical wife of a baker and hawker of pizza pies, played with a saucy swagger by Sophia Loren, helps him in a desperate search through their entire clientele for a valuable ring he had given her, possibly swallowed with merchandise— and which she knows all along she has mislaid at her lover's house...

...release—the last of which was Rossel-lini's momentous The Miracle, with Anna Magnani...

...The last episode is a broad, bawdy spoof of various institutions, as two prostitutes, to avoid a police roundup, get involved in a beauty contest...

...The presentation is carefully balanced, without being contrived...

...On television, of course, short stories are naturally more suitable than those of traditional feature length...

...It would be missing its true significance, however, to regard its qualities as especially meritorious in the category of short films, and irrelevant for general considerations of the cinema...

...The Ten Commandments slightly more...

...More than one The Bespoke Overcoat on a movie program would be worse than foolish...

...In some, the stories are organized around a central theme, e.g., the French The Seven Deadly Sins, the Franco-Italian The Bed, or the American Invitation to the Dance...

...Mankowitz has as much or more to say in his shorter adaptation...

...The Roots has won many honors, including the award of the International Film Critics at Cannes, and we may see why, as its cumulative effect is one of deeply-rooted beliefs given fluent, powerful articulation...

...They may also be taken to illustrate the splendid virtue of concision, when telling a story briefly is telling it the best way—and to suggest an indirect corollary: that most feature films, which have so much less of a story to tell, could not tell it at all if made to tell it briefly...

...They are not as subtle in theme or in their presentation by director Gianni Franciolini...

...But the film's simple quality of variety is instantly and ultimately attractive, permitting parts of the program that are not as good as others to fall into place, without dominating the whole, as so often happens in full-length films...

...The five stories of It Happened in the Park are more systematically unified than those of The Gold of Naples, relating incidents taking place in the Villa Borghese Gardens of Rome as a single day progresses...

...Mankowitz appreciates the paradox of art that true universality must be grounded upon the precisely particular—the real meaning of that advice to artists that is so often misunderstood in offering and application: that one should create out of what one knows...

...There are hardly ten released in the United States in any jear—of which two or three at most may be American...

...Theoretically, of course, a film ought to be just as long as it has to be, and the consideration of length should follow that of what it has to say, and the way it is to say it...

...Along the way, they impatiently attend a superbly caricatured wake, at which a widower, Paolo Stoppa, provides a precisely predictable performance of public grief and carefully frenzied despair...

...The younger of the two actually wins over a gaggle of respectable girls prodded along by their respectable mamas, and is driven off by a movie producer, apparently on her way to stardom...

...The stories are rarely profound, but consistently stimulating, the story collection format allowing a virtuoso film maker to put together a program of encore pieces for our amusement and wonder at his consummate artistry in delineating nuances of irony...

...The next, happening around noon, is a light confection about a secret tryst between a wealthy old roue and a young girl, that explodes into a noisy, public farce when her boy friend and mother arrive...

...The idea of a unitary principle for a story collection is carried further in The Roots, a Mexican production of four stories and a prologue adapted from Francisco Gonzales, and directed by Benito Alazraki...

...In some the storyteller is implied, as the film simply groups a few tales adapted from one author, as in the American O. Henry's full House and the treatment of two Ben Hecht pieces, Actors and Sin, or the British adaptation of Noel Coward's program, Tonight at 8:30, and the collections of Somerset Maugham stories, Quartet, Encore, and Trio...

...In others, they are actually episodes of a consistent narrative, as in La Ronde...

...Here may be seen one aspect of the programming problem that makes short fiction difficult to handle in the theaters—even if it could boast big stars...

...What may be the least successful of the stories has two of the biggest-name performers, Micheline Presle and Gerard Philipe, in a slight matter of the break-up, just as dusk is falling on the park, of a love affair between a married woman and a younger man...

...Blft its passion was turned into propat ganda, specifically political and dj...

...The compassion of this film is not cheap or patronizing—and eventually is not vicarious at all, as we are gently, inexorably driven to work very hard at our feelings...

...But the potentialities for attaining dramatic intensity have complementary opportunities for variety...

...The latter, being a true child, is quite grown up about play, and wins invariably and maddeningly...

...It is easy to imagine a full-length film made of the last story, i;P a prostitute, Silvana Mangano, who enters into marriage with a well-to do young man, only to discover pat it is not she who is to be re-deemed, but the young man who is iliberately punishing himself...

...These films exemplify the possibilities for greater variety of theme and treatment in the movies, once the matter of length is left to its proper place...

...The following story, in the afternoon, sets down a group of people haggling over the details of a coldly arranged marriage agreement, in the midst of the romantic leisured atmosphere of the park, with lovers walking about, and a group of dancers rehearsing on a nearby stage...

...minishingly universal as the film, in the manner sadly typical of well-intentioned doctrinairism, left the fundamental indictment of individual human cruelty behind to perorate against depersonalized "systems...

...Such a film conceivably might be likely to impress audiences—and to overwhelm any ordinary accompanying movie that is merely three times as long...

...Perhaps this, and increasing rewards for variety in theatrical programming, will offer encouragement to film makers to be brief, whenever brevity may happen to be the better part of fulfillment...

...As played by Alfie Bass and David Kossoff, under Jack Clayton's extraordinarily, pithy direction, they have an excruciating reality...

...The masterpiece of the four stories, however, is that in which a childish nobleman is so uncontrollably driven to gambling, at which he is as inept as he is unlucky, that he must play with the porter's young son...

...its very brevity is as much as we can bear...

...The other, apparently too old for such salvation, is trundled off to jail...

...Realism and fantasy are imaginatively merged in the eloquent photography of Wolfgang Su-schitzky, so that we perceive a poem, lyrically sad and comical, profoundly, inerrably moving...

...This is a film that won a first prize at the Venice Film Festival, a special award at Edinburgh, and an Academy Award this year...

...And it is also easy to think of how long and maudlin it would probably be without sharpening in any way its delicate satire of bourgeois conventions...

...It is conceivable that The Bet\ spoke Overcoat could be incorporate^-in a collection of short films—to/mi _actuvely in all likelihood, as the including portion, Collections of, this kind do reach the screen with a certain regularity, ahough they must be accounted rel-atively rare—in terms of their lim-ited distribution, as well as their pumber...

...for example, the exhibitors' perennial concern with audience turnover, and the related calculation of how many films have to be rented to fill a program, and how long they should run...

...The city couple that hires the wife of the impoverished peasant to act as "cow" for their baby...

...Practically, however, film length has had much more to do with factors which are and ought to be of posterior relevance in effecting the purpose of fiction...

...The principle avowedly is that the Indians, with their innate integrity and dignity, and memories and practices reaching into prehistory, are the true roots of the Mexican present and future...