The New Pictures

Houseboat (Paramount), according to the advancemen, is "a story of Togetherness," a warm, human comedy of American family life, written with "true realism." Father (Gary Grant) is "charming and debonair"--but unfortunately he has been away from home for several years. Mother is rich and beautiful--but unhappily she is a bad driver and gets killed in a car crash. The children (Charles Herbert, Mimi Gibson, Paul Petersen), as the scriptwriters seem to think, are all that any American parent could hope to have--"carefree, gay, and at times in need of psychiatric care."

As the film begins, Father announces that the children are going to live with him. They flatly refuse. Nervously but firmly, he insists on his rights. "What can we do?" one of the little darlings snarls. "He's got the law on his side." Another muses with a sinister smirk: "He ain't gonna like it." And so the story swiftly develops into yet another clumsy, commercial switch on what is probably the most popular comedy situation in contemporary U.S. humor: the problems of bringing up father.

As is customary in this situation, Father is just a headstrong bull in the china shop of human relations, and dear knows what a mess he would be in if he didn't have a capable woman and several ever-so-knowing children to pick up the pieces. At first, of course, there isn't any woman, but the children soon ignore their father into hiring a maid (Sophia Loren) who is just what the scriptwriter ordered. She wiggles around, sings peculiar popular songs ("Presto, presto, do your very best, oh"), boils an egg--obviously, to the children, a normal American homemaker.

Meanwhile, Father is making desperate attempts to be friendly, but the children are far too coony to be taken in. "What's this," sneers the older boy when Father tries to teach him how to fish, "the Huckleberry Finn approach?" And when he mildly reproves the younger son for some particularly brattish behavior, Sophia indignantly tells him: "Try to be a parent, not a policeman." In the end, when Father is reduced to gibbering ineffectiveness, the woman calmly and efficiently takes over and puts the poor man out of his misery by marrying him. At this point the children determine to assert their authority over both parents by refusing to attend the wedding. "Please," Father piteously pleads, while the children stare stonily at their comic books, "please come to my wedding. You know, you can't remain children forever." And why not? Father obviously did.

My Uncle (Continental). Jacques Tati is a French comedian whose big feet, small head, great height and bolted rigidity invest him, as he jerks and jolts and fidgets through his films, with the marvelously absurd demeanor of an Eiffel Tower out for a Sunday stroll. But from his solitary eminence, Moviemaker Tati (Jour de Fete, Mr. Hulot's Holiday) takes a solemn view of the comic art and the contemporary scene. "Look what is happening to us," he glooms. "This specialization. Depersonalization is taking all the human meaning out of our daily life. A man used to be proud of the way he could drive. Now the car drives itself. A mother used to be proud of her cakes. Now they bake themselves. A boy used to be proud of [the playthings] he invented. Now he is buried under factory-made toys. It is sad, no? Yes."

In this movie, much as Chaplin was in Modern Times, Tati seems more passionately determined to expound the technological unemployment of the soul in modern life than he is to relieve it with a saving smile. In consequence, this comedy of mechanized manners and synthesized morals--despite the big prize (Cannes Festival) and the rave reviews ("The greatest French comic film ever made") and the big money ($1,400,000) it earned in France--turns out to be the least amusing of the three pictures Tati has turned out. It is merely hilarious.

As usual in Tati's pictures, there is really no plot. On the one side, Tati lines up the protagonists of the gadget: a manufacturer of plastics, whose pride and joy is the cubistic chateau in which he spatially participates with a severely functional, ever-scrubbing wife, a discontented son who is obviously a round peg in a square hole, and a free-form dachshund. On the other side, Tati ranges the proponents of the casual life: Hulot himself, an awesomely inefficient employee of the department of sanitation, a big fat slob who sells vegetables from the back of a prehistoric delivery truck, a sneaky old female janitor and her moronic daughter, several sinister schoolboys, several drunks, an overstimulated canary and any number of mangy mutts.

The moviemaker cuts from one way of life to the other, makes his points by contrast. When he looks at life in the living machine, Tati has some wonderful fun with an electric stove that has a monstrous control panel, and with a rationalized garden in which, of course, nothing grows. But it is when he looks at life on the seamy side that Tati has his grandest inspirations. There is a marvelous sequence, apropos of nothing, in which a dog leads a man on a leash. Yet surely the funniest passage in the picture is the long slow crescendo of comedy in which four hard-eyed, ten-year-old gamblers squat in an empty lot, whistle at passing pedestrians, and make book on which of them will look around, forget where he is going and crash into the nearest lamppost.

At such moments--when he throws all social and philosophical considerations to the winds and concentrates on building up the exquisitely precarious card house of a complex gag--Comedian Tati seems the funniest funnyman now at work in films. The trouble is that Tati is not content to be merely a comedian. He has developed all sorts of crypto-Chaplinesque rationalizations about the deeper significance of Monsieur Hulot--"modern man ... at the mercy of objects . . . enmeshed by circumstances." The film, as a result of these lucubrations, is at least half an hour too long, and in the length it fails to find a rhythmic respiration that might have shaped so many disparate episodes into a breathing whole. Too bad that the great clowns always want to play Hamlet.

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