The Doily and the Dumpling

Whimsy is asthenic fantasy, a fragile, elusive quality difficult to render but easy to shatter into sentimentality. It is a commodity perhaps best left to books and greeting cards. Enlarged and expanded to fill a screen, it can become an overbearing thing, as two new movies pointedly prove.

The Madwoman of Chaillot is a severely earthbound version of Jean Giraudoux's airborne allegory of individual virtue and corporate evil in postwar France. It has been slicked up with sumptuous production and a heavyweight cast. Yet for all its weight, it has no more strength than a doily cut from Kleenex.

The madwoman (Katharine Hepburn) is a spinster who believes in young love, freedom and graciously decadent living. She feeds all the cats in her Paris suburb, writes daily letters to herself, lives in a mansion and worries equally about her 9-ft. feather boa and the loss, many years past, of her only lover. She would seem to be easy prey for a cartel of international shysters (Yul Brynner, Paul Henreid,* Charles Boyer, Donald Pleasence and Oscar Homolka among them) who have discovered oil under the old lady's property. But she will not be moved, and she wins the aid of some colorful companions--a ragpicker (Danny Kaye), a waitress (Nanette Newman) and a young student activist (Richard Chamberlain). In the end, she overcomes, imprisoning the villains in the Parisian sewer system and striking a blow for liberty.

Prominent among the innumerable faults of this lumpish production is some of the most embarrassing acting of the year. Pleasence and, surprisingly, Brynner are both amusing, but Danny Kaye performs as if he were addressing a fund-raising rally for UNICEF. As for Katharine Hepburn, she has long since shrouded herself in her mannerisms. If anyone parodied her as outrageously as she parodies herself, she could easily sue for libel.

The heroine of The Sterile Cuckoo is a happy little dumpling of a college freshman called Pookie, a name that holds promises of maudlin disaster. The movie fulfills them. Pookie (Liza Minnelli) is what used to be called, back in the dim and distant fifties, a kook. She does swell things like move in with her straight-arrow boy friend (Wendell Burton) while he is studying for his finals, puts tape across her mouth--'cause she's promised not to talk to him--and communicates with him by holding up signs. College is some bucolic wonderland where it is always fall, even in the depths of winter, and the students think that S.D.S. is some new kind of 3.2 beer. The Sterile Cuckoo is not only irrelevant to today, it is irrelevant to any time at all. Liza Minnelli, who is much too obviously the star of this project, strains to bring the whole thing off, but the task is greater than her talents.

*At 61, Henreid still looks remarkably like the same suave gentleman who lit Bette Davis' cigarettes in Now Voyager and watched Bogart and Bergman yearn after each other in Casablanca. These days, he spends most of his time in back of the camera, directing episodes of TV programs like Bracken's World.

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