The New Pictures

Beauties of the Night (Franco-London; United Artists). "If a workman were sure of dreaming every night that he was a king," wrote Blaise Pascal, "I believe he would be almost as happy as a king who dreamt every night that he was a workman." Borrowing plots from great philosophers is a quick way to get out of the movie business, but this time the borrower is Rene Clair (Sous les Toits de Paris, Le Million), a man as skillful with pictures as Pascal was with ideas. The result is a wonderfully natty little reductio ad absurdum--"all bird," as one observer put it, "and no stuffing."

A young composer (Gerard Philipe) lives in a small town in France, teaching school all day, writing music half the night, waiting to hear if the Paris Opera people like the score he sent them. The trouble is, there's so much noise. At the garage next door, they are always gunning engines and throwing tin cans around; when he goes for a walk, small boys follow him into the quietest parks and squawk their little tin horns. How can a man write music in such conditions?

Tired and overwrought, the composer falls asleep one day while administering a piano lesson to a rich man's child. He dreams that his pupil's beautiful mother (Martine Carol) is in love with him, and that he is a famous composer. Waking with a start, he hurries home, jumps into bed and starts to dream again.

From here on, the picture keeps blurring from dream to reality and back again, like the moon in a mist. In his first dream, which takes place around the turn of the century, the composer meets an old man who tells him all about the good old days, back in 1830. In a flash the musician becomes a bugler, off to sound the charge on some sultan's daughter (Gina Lollobrigida) in Algeria. But after lolling awhile with Lollobrigida, he meets the old man again, and is off to 1790 for some wig-nuzzling with a willing aristocrat (Magali Vendeuil).

In between trips on his private time machine, Gerard wears an otherworldly expression that begins to worry his friends. Is he considering suicide? They ply him with wine, let him win at cards. In short, they make him late for his triple date in dreamland. And what happened to a man who kept a lady waiting in 1900, in 1830, and in 1790 proves to be so much like what happens today that the composer is cured of his nostalgia and decides to risk being contemporary--a risk considerably sweetened by the charms of the garage-owner's daughter (also Magali Vendeuil). "Perfectly useless," Director Clair calls his picture, but that, of course, is the point of it. Besides, as James Joyce showed, woolgathering can be a fine art.

Rhapsody (M-G-M). Americans have nobler characters than Europeans. All great music was written by either Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff. Artists are the hottest lovers. Good musicians have long hair. All rich people are neurotic. Rhapsody is a relatively harmless tissue of such debatable propositions.

A spoiled rich witch (Elizabeth Taylor) loves a young European musical genius (Vittorio Gassman). Proof of Gassman's genius: a head of hair proportionately longer than that of less talented musicians. Elizabeth moves him into her apartment, but she keeps getting in his hair when he wants to practice, and pretty soon he walks out. On the rebound, she marries an American piano student (John Ericson) whose childishness, interpreted by the script as glowing Americanism, illuminates dark old Europe about as effectively as a ten-watt bulb.

The bright young man permits his wife to support him, but has to pay her so much attention in return that he is driven from keyboard to bar. In the end, of course. Actress Taylor sees the error of her ways and builds up the husband she has torn down, just in time for a gigantic Rachmaninoff rag at the finale.

The picture's musical score of popular classics is interpreted with spirit on the sound track by Pianist Claudio Arrau and Violinist Michael Rabin. There are also some Alps in the background, Technicolor and plenty of overdecorated interiors. Elizabeth Taylor wears beautiful clothes, and Vittorio Gassman, when he plays the fiddle in a ski suit, is the most dashing thing of the kind since the lovesick violinist in the perfume ad.

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