The New Pictures

Kiss Me Kate (MGM) might be subtitled "The Taming of the Show." Based on the Broadway musical based on Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, which was based on an Ariosto comedy based on an old folk tale, the picture is pretty far off any kind of base.

The Broadway show came excitingly to life because the audience felt itself transported through time to Shakespeare's Padua. The film merely tries to carry the audience back to old Broadway, but somehow, at the final curtain, it is still esthetically blundering around somewhere on the far side of the George Washington Bridge.

The plot, a musical within a musical, with its noisily surreptitious shifts from onstage to off, appears just too heavy and elaborate a vehicle for the camera to prod along. Even so. if other performers had spread the wings of song as grandly as Howard Keel (Petruchio), the picture might have been better.

Handsome Singer Keel, who appears to be a sort of Nelson Eddy with muscles, and is currently Hollywood's leading graduate of the Broadway school of musi-comedy, has not only a fine chesty baritone but the chest to go with it. As a blonde actress who plays a petulant Kate in a reddish wig. Kathryn Grayson pouts prettily but looks as though she is never quite sure who she is.

Ann Miller has a lovely pair of legs and tries hard to live up to them. Keenan Wynn and James Whitmore, as the collection agents for a prominent gambler, should bring down the house as two of the daintiest thugs who ever did a sentimental buck and wing at the annual picnic of Murder, Inc. The rest of the dances, however, seem overrehearsed--as though the dancers had long since stopped enjoying them. Only the music, some of the very best that Cole Porter ever wrote, is unimpaired; the picture is almost worth seeing just to hear it again.

The Living Desert (Walt Disney) looks like the start of a grand-scale attempt to seduce Mother Nature with a motion-picture camera. Having handsomely reached first base with a few short sorties into the animal kingdom (Beaver Valley, Seal Island, Water Birds, Olympic Elk, Bear Country), Walt Disney has apparently decided to invite the whole creation to go commercial.

In The Living Desert, his first full-length nature film, he modestly takes a mere quarter-million square miles for his province--the harsh and lovely world of the great American desert. Despite all the petty efforts to Disneyfy what the ages have dignified, The Living Desert remains a triumphantly beautiful film.

The beauty was caught by the sharp eyes of two fine cameramen, N. Paul Kenworthy Jr. and Robert H. Crandall, who roamed for over two years from New Mexico to Oregon, prospecting for pictorial gold. (Sequences were also contributed by Stuart V. Jewell, Jack C. Couffer, Don Arlen and Tad Nichols.) They brought back a pokeful of high-grade nuggets.

As the film starts, the audience looks into a mirage as into a giant's dream; next the camera traces the uncanny passage of a kind of desert rock that apparently walks by itself when nobody is looking. A little further on, the camera comes in close to watch two common tortoises, crowding the screen like prehistoric Panzers, churn into battle for possession of a female. Soon the audience is gliding along beside a rattler as he tracks a pocket mouse by tasting its footsteps with cold relish.

Night falls. A millipede, blown up to the size of a telegraph pole, strolls daintily on paired pedicles into the maw of a hairy tarantula as big as a rustic pavilion. The tarantula snaps it up, spits it out--millipedes, it seems, have an unpleasant flavor. And there in the low moon's eye a coral snake, bright-braceleted, coils, lashes, writhes in a rapt dance that is mysteriously troubling to the onlooker.

Two remarkable conflicts agitate the last half of the film: one between a tarantula and a pepsis wasp, the other between a hawk and a rattler. The wasp and the hawk win, the latter after a magnificent struggle. The awful wing and eye, and the cruel tangle of claws, burn an image on the mind that takes more than a few minutes to heal.

The very strength of the destructive images is one of the film's weaknesses. More information could have been presented in a more gracious flow of frames if the editors had not felt obliged to juice it up at every turn with violence. But Disney's cameramen have not altogether overlooked the beauty of nature. The camera seeks it out even in the hearts of the huge desert flowers, and dwells there, in the mild lusters and warm colors, through a long, slow passage. And yet the beauty is too often vitiated with cuteness. The mating rite of scorpions is set to the whinny of mountain music--a funny, enough gag, but other gags, not so funny, reduce the picture sometimes to the level of recent Donald Duck cartoons. The music and the narration, as is usual in Disney's nature films, seem by contrast with the fine pictures even more corny than they are.

Yet. all in all, Producer Disney deserves credit for bringing the moviegoing millions back in this film, for a few minutes at a time, to a sense of intimate participation in the vast natural order of life.

The Joe Louis Story (Walter P. Chrysler Jr.; United Artists) should take the public on points. The main point is that Coley Wallace is convincing as Joe Louis. A 25-year-old from Jacksonville, Wallace stands 6 ft. 2 in., tips about 200, looks a little like Joe, and (according to Eighth Avenue money) might even some day buckle on the belt the Bomber wore so long. Coley's record as a professional: 15 kayos in 20 fights.

The camera picks Joe up as a big, quiet kid in Detroit on his way to a violin lesson, and carries him through the easy buildup to the hard letdown in the twelfth round of the first Schmeling fight. The second Schmeling fight is used as the climax of Joe's career--as maybe it was. After that, the story peters out through Joe's money and marriage troubles until he lies flat on his back beneath Marciano's good right hand.

Best shots: the newsreel snippings of Joe's actual fights, in which he makes most of his opponents look as if they desperately wished they weren't.

Decameron Nights (RKO Radio) gives moviegoers a delicious bee-sip at the sensuous bud of the Italian Renaissance. Freely adapted from Boccaccio's lusty Decameron by Scriptwriter George Oppenheimer, and filmed in Spain by an Anglo-American production team, the picture opens with a roll of drums as mercenaries march in to sack a small Italian town. Boccaccio (Louis Jourdan) is momentarily trapped by the soldiers while searching for his beloved Fiametta (Joan Fontaine), a virtuous widow who is seemingly in perpetual mourning for her aged husband.

With the help of Binnie Barnes, a worldly countess who has also fled besieged Florence (in the Decameron, Florence is beset, not by an army, but by the plague), Jourdan reaches the isolated castle where Widow Fontaine and a bevy of susceptible young ladies are sitting out the war. To woo Joan, Jourdan tells a brace of stories (Paganino the Pirate and The Doctor's Daughter) that mock her strait-laced morality. She defends her austere position with a story of her own (Wager of Virtue). All the stories are played by the same cast; all are amusing, mildly racy, and acted with a tongue-in-cheek seriousness that adds up to a rib of Hollywood costume pictures. Joan Fontaine shows a surprisingly deft comic touch, while Louis Jourdan handles his dashing, romantic role with just the right element of buffoonery. The late Godfrey Tearle is convincing as Joan's pompous, penny-pinching husband. Director Hugo Fregonese (Apache Drums, My Six Convicts) seems perfectly at home with his 14th-century material, and special honors go to Britain's Guy Green, director of photography: the alternately spare and lush beauty of his Technicolor interiors might well have delighted Lorenzo de' Medici.

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