The New Pictures

The Big Lift (20th Century-Fox) is an ambitious, two-hour film that pays the price of trying to do too much: document the Berlin airlift, take the measure of postwar Germany, sell democracy, and keep an audience entertained. At times the price seems heavy, but it is not too much to pay for a movie with enough originality, authenticity and skilled craftsmanship to set it apart from the production run of Hollywood.

To make The Big Lift, Writer-Director George (Miracle on 34th Street) Seaton spent nine months of preparation in Germany, three months of shooting on actual locations. He used only two Hollywood actors (Montgomery Clift and Paul Douglas), plus a handful of German professionals and a large supporting cast of U.S. Air Force officers & men whom he turned into surprisingly convincing actors portraying themselves.

At its best, the movie is an absorbing, human documentary of the airborne supply of a Soviet-blockaded Berlin.* It spins the hard facts smoothly into what is essentially a story of individual Americans and Germans. It catches the raillery and workaday heroism of the U.S. air crews, as well as some sharp vignettes, both grim and comic, of life in a broken, hungry city. Its camera work does full justice to the brooding ruins of Berlin and to graceful C-545 gliding dangerously down to a fog-shrouded Tempelhof field.

Seaton's story of two sergeants is also neatly designed to serve his other purposes, and in the main it serves them well: Clift is a good-hearted young Midwesterner who approaches the Germans with naive friendliness, and Douglas is a roughneck who loathes them with a bitterness stored up as a prisoner of war. Clift becomes disillusioned in a love affair with a calculating Berlin girl (Cornell Borchers) who hopes to use him as a passport to the U.S. Douglas is shamed by another German girl (Bruni Lobel) who turns out to be a better democrat than he is. Out of these experiences, and a string of minor incidents, the picture builds an oversimplified but well-argued U.S. point of view toward Germany--i.e., compassion with vigilance.

In attempting so much, The Big Lift becomes overlong and somewhat unwieldy. But where the picture really goes wrong, and badly, is in having Douglas spout repeated primer-level sales talks for democracy at his girl friend; the result is clumsy propaganda in a movie that would be excellent propaganda without it.

Clift and Douglas give unaffected performances that blend nicely with the acting of Director Seaton's remarkable nonprofessionals. Germany's O. E. Hasse shines as a cheerfully self-professed Soviet spy who feeds the Russians bogus airlift statistics because they will not believe the real ones in the newspapers. The film's most notable performer: Actress Cornell Borchers, who clearly qualifies as a "find." Alluring in a way that falls mercifully short of Hollywood's beauty-contest standards, she gives her role an unusual depth and subtlety.

Wabash Avenue (20th Century-Fox) brings Betty Grable back once again to what a studio publicity release hails as a "tried-and-true formula" picture. "The studio apologizes," says the handout coyly, "for putting her into a satire [That Lady in Ermine'] and asks forgiveness for that time two years ago when it showed her legs only once in eight reels--to the consternation of enraged millions."

The new Technicolored musical makes up for the lapse by showing as much of Betty as Hollywood can bare--no doubt to the delight of appreciative millions. While she wiggles and struts through I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate, all that stands between her and her fans are a few strategically placed tassels. In many another scene, the picture stands firmly on Betty's two gorgeous legs.

What the handout does not mention is that the studio, in its ardor to be tried & true, has remade Coney Island, a 1943 Grable hit, in a Chicago setting and called it Wabash Avenue. It is still the story of two conniving, double-crossing gamblers (Victor Mature and Phil Harris) who wrangle over the ownership of gaslight-era cafes and the affections of Betty Grable. A different musical score mixes oldtime songs with new ones that are so reminiscent that it is hard to tell which is which. For that matter, the new picture is hardly distinguishable from the original and, on any account, hardly distinguished. But Grable fans will treasure it for leaving so little to their imagination.

Champagne for Caesar (Harry Popkin; United Artists) has a head start over most Hollywood comedies: an original idea with some satiric bite. But it soon grows painfully clear that the idea has fallen into the wrong hands. Setting out to make radio's giveaway craze look silly, the picture winds up looking even sillier.

Ronald Colman plays Beauregard Bottomley, an omniscient bookworm who is convinced that radio's money-splurging quiz shows threaten the U.S. with "intellectual destruction," and sets out to strike a blow for intellectual salvation. An expert who can't be stumped, he appears on Soap Manufacturer Vincent Price's double-ornothing program week after week, letting his winnings pile up with the plan of taking over the whole $40-million soap company. When the alarmed hucksters try to give him what he has already won and get rid of him, a hero-loving public refuses to buy any soap unless he keeps going.

With a Clifton Webb playing the lead and some bright scripters on the job, the picture might have turned into a devastating satire of radio's foolish age. Veteran Colman does well enough in his orotund English style, but the writers fail him almost completely. Basically, they miss the vital point--which Miracle on 34th Street caught so well--that the story's fantastic premise should be played out as if the impossible were really happening. Instead, the film has been pitched on a wobbly note of broad burlesque with overtones of self-conscious whimsy, e.g., the soap company's headquarters all decked out in tricky, Daliesque sets with bare arms growing out of satin quilted walls.

Celeste Holm, as the vixen whom the hucksters use to trip up Colman, is much better than her material, but Actor Price, wallowing in an outrageously flamboyant role, outhams Orson Welles. For a while, radio's Quizmaster Art (People Are Funny) Linkletter, a toothy paragon of commercial insincerity, seems an inspired choice for an obnoxious giveaway M.C. But then the script switches about and tries to palm him off as a sympathetic character. Having blunted its point throughout, the picture finally tosses it away altogether by having Colman sell out to Price in a deal that gives him a quiz program of his own.

* Last week in Southern Pines, N.C., the Air Force screened The Big Lift as part of a briefing for its 600-plane Exercise Swarmer, "a tactical application of the Berlin airlift under mock-combat conditions."

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