New Picture

The Private Affairs of Bel Ami (Loew-Lewin; United Artists) is the latest example of Albert Lewin's passion for bringing musky literary classics to the screen. Writer-Director Lewin is responsible for movie versions of Maugham's The Moon & Sixpence and Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. His adaptation of Maupassant's coldly sardonic novel Bel Ami is his smoothest job to date. But it also clearly defines the limitations of Mr. Lewin's kind of movie art.

A caption warns the audience, straight off: "This is the story of a scoundrel"--i.e., he is not to be mistaken for a human being. Georges Duroy (George Sanders)--Bel Ami to his lady friends--is a scoundrel, at the very least. Starting all but penniless, he climbs aboard Journalist John Carradine's friendship; charms Carradine's brainy wife (Ann Dvorak) into working for him; draws her widowed friend (Angela Lansbury) into a hopeless infatuation; sets a publisher's virtuous wife (Katherine Emery) burning with ill-repressed desire for him; exploits the virginal love of her daughter (Susan Douglas) ; makes a pass (unsuccessful) at devout Frances Dee; contracts a convenience marriage with Widow Dvorak over the scarcely cold body of her husband; frames her with Diplomat Warren William in order to be free to marry little Miss Douglas; buys a title and, ultimately, gets killed in a duel.

Maupassant's novel was a relentless demonstration of what a thoroughly corrupt man can do to get ahead in a thoroughly corrupt society. Its cynical moral: sufficient vice usually succeeds and goes unpunished, whereas halfhearted vice --like virtue -- is likely to enjoy less spectacular rewards. Mr. Lewin's modification: vice generally gets too smart for its own good. George Sanders, who starred in both of Lewin's previous pictures and is a sort of staff Lothario, by now does this kind of work very efficiently. The supporting cast is competent and the picture is lovingly made and handsomely mounted.

But really good movies, like really good literature, are never so "literary" as this or so full of highly polished posturings. Director Lewin also sets himself the impossible task of trying to clean up a naughty story for the family trade. Because adultery is taboo to Hollywood's censors, Angela Lansbury is represented as a widow and Mr. Sanders does not take up with Miss Dvorak until she is a widow too. An old gentleman who was unmistakably Miss Dvorak's lover in the book is presented in film as a dear old friend of the family. A part which Maupassant thought of as a very shady lady (prostitute, except in Hollywood), is played by Marie Wilson, who is identified as "a dancer."

Writer-Director Lewin reportedly contents himself with the assurance that those who are smart enough can still see, in spite of such subterfuges, everything that Maupassant really meant. Those who are smart enough for keyhole-peeping, and no smarter, will doubtless enjoy it.

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