Smile, Watch the Birdie

Francis of Assisi (Perseus; 20th Century-Fox) is only a medium-sized religious picture; there are plenty of horses and a couple of cheetahs but no elephants. Still. Producer Plato Skouras took pains to please Papa Spyros. To tell the story of St. Francis, he took color cameras, cast and Director Michael Curtiz to Assisi.

Townspeople and Franciscan monks were persuaded to take minor roles, and the city was authenticked up by set designers. Crews scouted the Umbrian landscape for inspirational vistas, and cameramen photographed yards of Giotto frescoes on which to superimpose the screen credits. With all the activity, it was natural that everyone forgot about St. Francis--not Actor Bradford (Compulsion) Dillman but the gentle mendicant he was supposed to portray.

The film gives nothing of the doubts or, for that matter, the certainties that must torture a man obsessed by God. Dillman rolls his eyes upward now and then in the manner of cinema divines and photographers' models in spaghetti ads, but otherwise he shows no evidence of sainthood. He floats through the film wearing at all times a smile of seraphic boobery, and his followers grin constantly at whatever faces them: another actor, a tree, a blank wall.

Dolores Hart, an actress whose round face seems to have been cut from moist white bread, contributes to this weirdly unanimous good will as St. Clare, founder of the women's branch of the Franciscan order. She giggles. All of this is understandable, being the result of a general lack of competence. What is baffling is the film makers' failure to include what should have been the movie's boffo scene. These men bear watching; thinkers who leave out of a life of St. Francis the story of his preaching to the birds and "making the swallows hold their peace" are quite capable of filming a biography of Abraham Lincoln without mentioning the Civil War.

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