In the Meantime

While Hollywood hoards its brightest baubles (see above), theater owners across the nation are fighting what Variety calls a "starved market" with a batch of foreign imports.

Last week close to 20 new European films were showing on U.S. screens--a'nd not only in the "art houses" that normally exhibit them. Hundreds of independent theater owners have decided that U.S. moviegoers will gladly jump the language barrier if they are promised plenty of sex on the other side. "Frankly carnal!" shout the extra-column ads. "Passion-driven . . . she married the father to seduce the son!" And God Created Woman ("but the Devil invented Brigitte Bardot") will probably be booked into no fewer than 4,000 U.S. movie houses--largely on the strength of the heroine's moral weakness (TIME, Nov. 11).

Though most of the foreign fare is currently unappetizing, some of it is not stale cheesecake. Gervaise (Continental), for instance, is a French adaptation of Emile Zola's mighty diatribe against drink, L'Assommoir. The film comes so extravagantly praised and prized--it has won top awards at Venice, London and Tokyo--that U.S. moviegoers may find they have been built up for a letdown. The great realist who wrote the book had swallowed the lower depths of Paris like a huge, unwholesome oyster, and he vomited the city live and steaming onto his pages -- a superbly revolting performance. But where the book was crude and powerful, Rene Clement's film is tasteful and selective, full of the very sort of literary chic that Zola's novel was intended to attack. For all that, the film is a deeply impressive experience. Director Clement, who has scarcely made a reel worth watching since Forbidden Games, guides Maria Schell, as the doomed heroine, through a marvelously vital and various portrayal of a character almost as difficult to bring alive as a door mat. But the strongest thing in the picture is the deep, dark, peasant anger of old Zola. He shakes his fist from the grave, and shakes the audience like beans in a rattle.

The British have come through with a number of comedies. The Colditz Story (DCA) is a pretty example of Stiff Upper Lipmanship, Jolly Good Show Division. Broadly speaking, the script follows the facts as set down in the book by Major Patrick Reid, escape officer of a British contingent at Colditz Castle in Saxony, the most closely guarded of all Germany's P.W. camps. Escaping prisoners keep popping off in all directions like clay pigeons, and the Germans keep shooting them down, but somehow hardly anybody gets hurt -- the implication being that Englishmen are really too clever to get themselves killed. As usual in this sort of thing, the Germans are all neck, the British all cheek, and the audience all ears for the next jeer at poor old jerry.

How to Murder a Rich Uncle (Columbia), another British entry, is advertised. with a lead ballooniness characteristic of the production, as "a do-it-yourself picture." The idea, suggested of course by the success of Kind Hearts and Coronets, was to be killingly funny, but this time the whimsy is too flimsy. The rich uncle of the title (Charles Coburn) pays a visit to his nephew-(Nigel Patrick), a spectacularly impecunious peer -- long on tradition and short on port. Wouldn't dream of "imposing" on his uncle for a loan. Heavens, no. Only decent thing to do is to murder the old boy. But every time the nephew baits a trap, who gets caught? The paying customer.

Cabiria (Lopert) is the best of the Italian contributions, remarkable chiefly in the story it tells. "Vieni qua," says the famed Italian actor (Amedeo Nazzari). The shabby little streetwalker (Giulietta Masina) can hardly believe her ears, but she jumps into his flashy American car, and they drive to his villa, a California! creation on the Appian Way. "Where do you live?" he asks her idly, as she nibbles at caviar and lobster in his overpoweringly seductive apartment. "Oh," she answers him, dazed with all the magnificence and trying desperately to live up to it, "I'm not like the others. I never sleep under the aqueduct. I have a house of my own -- everything! Even a thermometer!" He smiles tolerantly. Suddenly she begins to cry. "But when I tell them about all this," she sobs, "who's going to believe me!" He grandly scribbles a testimonial, and signs it. Somehow, after her taste of the finer things, life on the streets does not seem the same to the little whore. Nameless yearnings assail her. One day she joins a procession to a shrine of the Virgin. She falls to her knees and groans: "Holy Mother, help me to change my life."

The story has its pathos; but as the picture tells it, the tale is all too often merely pathetic. The fault lies chiefly with Director Federico Fellini. the brilliant creator of I Vitelloni, who has revived the bathetic excesses of La Strada without its noble brutalities. As for Fellini's wife, Actress Masina, she gives, almost gesture for Chaplinish gesture, the performance that made her famous as the idiot girl in La Strada. It's a case of the right part in the wrong picture.

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