Critics' Choices
The customary year's end blizzard of film awards blanketed Showman Michael Todd's Around the World in 80 Days with "best movie" honors, cheers coming from both the New York Film Critics (10 to 6 for the film on a preliminary ballot) and the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures. Their mutual choice as best director: John Huston for Moby Dick. In other categories they differed. Best Actor: Kirk Douglas in Lust for Life (Critics), Yul Brynner in The King and I, Anastasia and The Ten Commandments (Board). Best Actress: Ingrid Bergman in Anastasia (Critics), Dorothy McGuire in Friendly Persuasion (Board). Best Screenwriter: S. J. Perelman for Around the World (Critics only). Best foreign film: La Strada (Critics), The Silent World (Board).
The "best" actors of 1956 were not mentioned in the Motion Picture Herald's poll to determine the year's biggest box-office draws. Herald's top-ten ratings, including only two actresses and reflecting the opinions of some 16,000 theater owners in the U.S. and Canada: 1) William Holden, 2) John Wayne, 3) James Stewart, 4) Burt Lancaster, 5) Glenn Ford, 6) Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, 7) Gary Cooper, 8) Marilyn Monroe, 9) Kim Novak, 10) Frank Sinatra.
The New Pictures
Bundle of Joy (RKO Radio). The original of this movie, released in 1939, was called Bachelor Mother, a title bearing such intimations of immorality that the studio had to fight the censors to retain it. The movie was a spoof of bastardy. But with Ginger Rogers and David Niven starred in it and with Hollywood's boy wonder of the day, 26-year-old Garson Kanin, directing, the spoof was wholesome, human and hilarious. Bundle of Joy is wholesome. It is an energetic attempt to prove that what was done so deftly in the '30s, Hollywood's golden age of light comedy, can be done just as well in the '50s. Producer Edmund Grainger has lavished a sumptuous production on the slight yarn, and given the lead roles to Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, a celebrated young married couple in real life who recently produced a bundle of joy on their own. The film also has eight new tunes and Technicolor.
The nice little big-city fairy tale: a poor but pretty working girl falls for the boss's son after finding a foundling that nobody will believe is not her own. What the story badly needs is a group of skilled comedians. Eddie Fisher, no actor, has a pleasant voice, and Debbie Reynolds has a pleasant face. The main trouble is that Director Norman Taurog has dished up his souffle with a fairly heavy hand.
The King and Four Queens (Russ-Field-Gabco; United Artists). Clark Gable, known for a couple of decades in Hollywood as "the King," usually courts or is courted by a pair of beauties before he and his favorite finally go into a clinch. This time, instead of having to choose between two beautiful girls, he is pursued by four--a redhead, a brunette and a couple of blondes. But although he likes blondes, brunette and redhead, his favorite color is gold.
A fast shooter and quick thinker, Gable breezes into a small western town and meets gun-totin' Ma McDade (Jo Van Fleet) and her four daughters-in-law. Three of their outlaw husbands have been blown to bits by dynamite, and the fourth has escaped, leaving behind their loot of $100,000 in gold. Only Ma knows where it is hidden, and she isn't saying. Meanwhile, the four beauties, hoping to find out, have been waiting around for two years in the one-horse town of Wagon Mound, and in all that time not a man has been within reach. Enter Gable.
The brunette (Jean Willes) is peppery, impassioned, and murmurs to Gable: "What's mine is yours." "Yeah," he growls before taking her in his arms, "but now we're talking money." One of the blondes (Sara Shane) is sweet and willowy. She leads him to the spring in broad daylight; he leads her back at dusk. Says Ma: "You been a long time at the spring." Says Gable: "I was thirsty." Obviously the redhead (Eleanor Parker) will turn out to be Gable's match. Like him, she is "smarter than spit, colder than January." But as they ride off into the sunset, warily sharing the loot, it is plain that their love will last until one gets away with the other's gold.
Actor Gable, still looking fit at 55, turns in his usual competent performance. The movie is routine, but the four queens are so good to look at in DeLuxe color that Entrepreneur Gable, in his first independent production, is probably holding a winning hand.
CURRENT & CHOICE
The Rainmaker. Forecast: sunny comedy, with spells of metaphysical drizzle (Burt Lancaster), occasional electric storms (Katharine Hepburn), romantic sunset (TIME, Dec. 31).
The Teahouse of the August Moon. Menu: tee-hee (scented with sociology) and a side dish of red-white-and-blue-striped slapstick, charmingly served by Marlon Brando, Glenn Ford, Machiko Kyo (TIME, Dec. 10).
The Magnificent Seven. Blood and thunder in medieval Japan, with overtones of agrarian allegory, masterfully directed by Akira Kurosawa, who made Rashomon (TIME, Dec. 10).
Marcelino. A miracle play filled with a shining sweetness, made in Spain by Director Ladislao Vajda (TIME, Nov. 26).
Vitelloni. One of the best of the Italian-made movies--a biting but not bitter satire of small-town life, by Federico Fellini, who directed La Strada (TIME, Nov. 5).
Around the World in 80 Days. Producer Mike Todd, with the help of Jules Verne, 46 stars and $6,000,000, has created the most spectacular travelogue ever seen on the screen (TIME, Oct. 29).
Wee Geordie. The stiffest comic punch the British have delivered since High and Dry--an intoxicating mixture of Scotch and wry; with Bill Travers, Alastair Sim (TIME, Oct. 29).
Giant. A big (3 hr. 18 min.), tough picture based on Edna Ferber's bestseller about Texas; with Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, James Dean (TIME, Oct. 22).
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.