The New Pictures

Count Your Blessings (M-G-M). A vague young Englishman (Tom Helmore), known to his friends as "a bit of a clot," has a parting word for the suave Marquis de Valhubert (Rossano Brazzi), who is flying off for a London leave during World War II. "Look up old Grace." Old Grace is his young fiancee. The marquis looks Grace up--and down. "We will marry immediately," he announces. They marry. Four days later the marquis heads back to the wars, and poor Grace (Deborah Kerr) has nothing to do but stitch rugs and eat for two (Sigi is born at the height of the blitz). Nine years later she is still stitching rugs and, as her father (Ronald Squire) puts it, "getting a bit weedy." The Marquis of Valhubert has been 1) captured by the Germans, 2) interned by the Russians, 3) ordered to the Sahara, 4) transferred to Lake Chad, 5) shipped to Ceylon, 6) posted to Damascus, 7) rushed off to Dienbienphu.

The rest of this elegantly furnished, tastefully Metrocolored film, in which director Jean (A Certain Smile) Negulesco has tried to turn Nancy Mitford's nit-witty high-society farce (TIME, Oct. 15, 1951) into a conventional comedy, develops into a fairly funny, mildly sophisticated what-is-it, rather like an interpolation of The Diary of a Chambermaid with the last six books of the Odyssey.

When Ulysses comes home at last, his Penelope is so stunned at the sight of him that she can only shake his hand and stutter civilities. "Was Dienbienphu awful?" "Yes. Toward the end of the siege we ran out of wine." "That must have been awful." "Yes." A honeymoon breaks the ice, but the relationship refreezes when the marchioness discovers that her marquis keeps a woman on the side, and maintains any number of "little 5-to-7" friendships. From this point the comedy evolves into an earnest lecture, delivered by the marquis' uncle (Maurice Chevalier), on the merits of marriage in the Gallic manner. The French, according to this movie, understand these things better. Perhaps, but they certainly understand these things well enough not to lecture people about them.

Still and all, for the customer who wants a little sentimental education, this is a pretty pleasant way to get it. Actors Chevalier and Brazzi ooze the old-world charm. Actress Kerr is lovely to look at, and in a comedy role reveals a subtle sense of humor and a refined capacity to express it. And the script is often amusing in a mildly risky way. "When I think," the heroine rages, "he was making love to all the others at the same time!" And her father replies with gentle horror: "Surely not at the same time."

Tempest (DeLaurentiis; Paramount), billed as "an overwhelming human storm," is all too obviously just a gigantic blast of hot air. Tempest rages for more than two hours, probably cost more than $3,000,000 to produce--even though most of the big scenes were shot on the cheap in Yugoslavia. More than 3,000 Yugoslav peasants and some 4,500 cavalrymen of the Yugoslav army are employed as camera fodder. To top it off, nine big names (Silvana Mangano, Van Heflin, Viveca Lindfors, Geoffrey Horne, Oscar Homolka, Agnes Moorehead, Helmut Dantine, Finlay Currie, Vittorio Gassman) have been stacked on the billboards like a packet of insurance policies.

The insurance policies, unfortunately, look less impressive on celluloid than they do on paper. Actress Lindfors, as Catherine the Great, does almost nothing but flare her nostrils and writhe imperial smiles. Actor Horne, as the ensign on garrison duty, cannot even say Bielogorsk, the name of the village he is stationed in. And Actor Heflin is so effectively concealed behind a home-grown field of orange chin wheat that it is hard to tell whether he is acting or not.

The story is based on The Captain's Daughter, a novella by Alexander Pushkin, in the same sense that the fat lady in the circus is based on the slender girl she used to be. For example, the fall of Bielogorsk is the climax of a vast and violent scene of carnage in which cannons roar and hundreds fall. In the book Pushkin disposes of the incident in little more than a sentence: "The rebels ran up to us and rushed into the fortress." But the camera work by Aldo Tonti is often good in a wild, panoromantic way, the color has a silvery, subarctic tone, and the fiery, dainty Yugoslav horses seem to come curvetting out of a fairy tale. Nevertheless, Producer Dino (War and Peace) DeLaurentiis, by overexciting the plot, has not made time fly, but Tempest fidget.

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