The New Pictures

The Glass Slipper (M-G-M), Hollywood feels about as comfortable with Leslie Caron as a truck driver does with a beret--whatever it is, it's not normal. Everybody loved her in Lili (TIME, March 9' . 1953)) but what was it everybody loved? Was she pretty? Not by the usual U.S. standards. Could she act? In Lili it was hard to tell whether she was acting, or just doing what came naturally. "She's gamine," the critics said. The producers asked their wives what that meant, and decided that, as usual, the critics were wrong. A studio flack perhaps came closer to the truth of the matter when he said: "The face of an eight-year-old girl, the body of a voluptuous woman. It's practically perverse. She's the poor little match girl--with sex."

The Glass Slipper breathes, as Lili did, the atmosphere of a latter-day fairy tale. It is, in fact, the Cinderella story rewritten with the sort of sophistication best confined to the perfume ads. The prince (Michael Wilding) no longer loves his lass just because she is beautiful. He admires her "great agonized . . . rebellious eyes." The glass slipper is now made of "the finest Venetian glass." And the fairy godmother (Estelle Winwood) is a queer old dear who wanders around saying "window sill" because it sounds so nice.

Still, there are some pleasant things here too. Some of the scenes have a Lili-like lilt. One of the ballets, in which Michael gives Leslie a cooking lesson in the palace kitchen, is a sightly romp. The color is fresh and bright. Cinderella's dress for the ball is wonderful--the skirt looks like a frilly igloo* --and Leslie wears it as a princess should. And when all else fails, there is Keenan Wynn. As somebody called Kovin, a confidant of the prince, poor Keenan has practically nothing to do all through the picture except to stride up and down in a red plush, heel-length smoking jacket, scratch his peruke, suck on a long-stemmed pipe, and grunt. It all gets a little eerie, after a while.

One Summer of Happiness (Times Film). "Say, let's swim!" cries Goran (Folk Sundquist). He is alone with Kerstin in the woods near the edge of a lake, and the day is as warm as days ever get in Sweden. Kerstin (Ulla Jacobsson), who is only 17, dimples and looks away, but then she says, "For you I'm not bashful." They undress and run laughing and gasping into the icy shallows. The laughter dies on Goran's lips as he sees her standing there, pretty as a pear. "Kerstin!" he says. She turns toward hirn with a yielding look, and he takes her in his arms. "Goran," she murmurs dreamily. "Don't forget me!" Without a word he carries her to the shore, where they lie in a sun-spangled shade. "Kerstin," he asks gravely, apparently unaware that the camera is gawking under his armpit at the girl. "Do you know what this means?"

If Kerstin doesn't, the U.S. distributors of this Swedish picture do. It means money in the bank. In advance showings in 14 states where nudity is permitted on the screen, Slimmer has grossed more than $400,000. However, the film is not likely to do so well in states where the moviegoer is not allowed to encounter the facts of life vis-a-viscera. When the love scenes are excised, there is not much of any sort of interest in this childishly rebellious business about young love and old prejudices. The horse it flogs was flogged to death by North European intellectuals half a century and more ago; in modern Sweden unwed mothers are paid a state subsidy for the support of their children. Sadder still to report, little Ulla Jacobsson, who behaves so exquisitely with her clothes off, cannot act very well when she has them on.

Untamed (20th Century-Fox). Hollywood traditionally measures the worth of a film by the amount 'of money it costs. This picture may establish a new scale of critical values. Last week a studio press release solemnly recommended it as one in which no fewer than "16 wind machines" had been used, "the most ever assembled for a 20th Century-Fox picture." It has, by the wind-machine standard, all the qualities of greatness: "Sweep and magnitude . . . Africa . . . CinemaScope . . . color by De Luxe ... a great story . . . irresistible passion," and even "ethnic glories." It lasts for in minutes and it was considered "prohibitively expensive" to make--a fact that unfortunately did not prohibit the studio from making it.

Director Henry King (The Snows of Kilimanjaro) and a crew of 40 were sent to South Africa. There, harassed by "snakes, ticks and other insects," and "in the presence of lions," they shot the backgrounds for the picture. For one scene the studio hired 3,000 Zulu warriors, shipped them by plane and oxcart to the Valley of the Thousand Hills in Natal province, and there built a small city named "Zanuckville" to house them.

Fox did not go to all this trouble for nothing. Untamed is a Zulu lulu--the sort of costume adventure that may, in a generation or two, produce a race of moviegoers with their eyes popped out on stalks. The picture offers: 1) a full-dress Irish hunt in full cry after a fox; 2) a formal ball in an Irish country house; 3) the great Irish potato famine of the 18405; 4) the Great Trek of the Boers from Cape Town to the fertile valleys of the interior; 5) the war dance of 3,000 Zulus and their attack on a wagon ring; 6) a savage fight between two men armed with bullwhips; 7) a cloudburst, during which a huge tree is felled by lightning; 8) the gruesome amputation of a leg; 9) another formal ball, this time in a South African mansion; 10) a battle royal in a mining town.

The plot hops from peak to peak of interest with a goatish nimbleness. Tyrone Power, a Boer bushfighter, visits Ireland to buy horseflesh and meets Susan Hayward, who follows him to Africa. When they meet again in the big attack--in which not a hair of her pretty red head is ruffled--Ty says exactly the right thing: "You . . . here in Africa fighting Zulus ... I can hardly believe it."

*Designer's description: "Silk tulle over silk brocade trimmed in little crystals and French flowers." The dress contains 215 yards of material, took ten seamstresses several weeks to put together. Studio carpenters had to cut a double door in Actress Caron's dressing room to make room for the hoops.

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