Contemporary Arts
Physiognomy
A Face in the Crowd. (Warner.)— The Three Faces of Eve. (Carlton.)—My Man Godfrey. (Leicester Square Theatre.) — The Little Hut. (Empire.)—The Bolshoi Ballet. (Gaumont,) ELIA KAZAN'S directorial guns are getting bigger, and his extreme sureness, the dash and exuberance of his style, make them as mobile as ever. In A Face in the Crowd they are trained on a big target : 'power, corruption, politics. It is a huge, ambitious, over- life-size affair, too long but not too loud, for the world it brings to us is a noisy one : television in America, with the terrifying influence a single man can exert through it, and the corrupting Power that a popular entertainer, backed by the advertiser's vast wealth, may acquire in no time, given the gullibility, the hero-worship, and the sheer silly warmheartedness of his audience. The story is that of a drunken tramp fished up in an ArkansaS gaol one fine morning by a chirpy girl from the local wireless station, who sings a song, twangs a guitar string, and comes out with some bits of homely backchat into her tape recorder. She calls him 'Lonesome,' and the corny, attrac- tive recording is enough of a hit for her to chase him down the road when he gets out of gaol and persuade him into a similar singing, twanging, Philosophising half-hour for housewives each morning. After that, it's full steam ahead. Triumphant, cynical, brash, with the lethal attrac- tion that comes from an air of complete sincerity, a homespun frankness that looks as if it has nothing to gain or lose, and the engaging casual- ness of the born entertainer, he moves from small- town radio to city television to nation-wide tele- vision and a following of scores of millions, from advertising mattresses with 'I usually sleep on the floor myself, but. . .' to ship-launching, moun- tains named after him and a power to sway opinion that gets him courted, not just by com- mercial advertisers but by an ugly political group With presidential ambitions, which promises him, in return for getting it in, a political plum when the time comes. Up, up, up . . . his downfall is catastrophic but credible and the obvious suicide that would round the agony dff nicely is cleverly withheld, leaving Lonesome (which is so much Worse) screaming in his skyscraper like a de- mented mouse up a grandfather clock.
Much of the film, living up to its title, consists of faces and crowds : crowds used, not like a lot of milling extras muttering 'rhubarb,' but 'like People feeling individual, as well as collective, enthusiasm, excitement, or anger; crowds behav- ing like collections of people, feeling together, yet Watched, as individuals, for wonderful sharp moments, as well; and faces of all kinds—I remember best the very old and the very young : the anciently ageless woman listening to her morn- ing wireless, or the rapt-away glory of the drum- majorette as she comes close to her hero, all her Pumping, adoring heart in her eyes. As the film turns on his personality, as much as his per- formance, as our belief in the whole thing rests on whether we can accept the fabulous emotional response to Lonesome, the casting of the main Part was critically important; and a newcomer to films, Andy Griffiths, looking much like a younger, lumpier version of Burt Lancaster, car-
ries it off triumphantly, making Lonesome a mixture of lout, demagogue, mixed-up kid and, above all, disastrous charmer that is completely convincing. However ruthless, however danger- ous he grows, he never seems sinister, never wholly loses his early air of geniality that makes the whole thing credible. As the girl who makes and in the end wrecks him Patricia Neal behaves like a person, not an actress, seems to be following not a script but the tormented impulses of her own heart : a painful but rather splendid thing to watch. Anthony Franciosa, a bombshell charmer himself, gives almost too much to his role as the hero's underling (it seems almost like having two Hamlets, one of them playing Horatio). Budd Schulberg's script is fast, at moments very funny, and tempers smoothness with humanity, never sacrificing truth for a crack, never making an isolated point or a wasted joke, but gathering everything to its explosive climax.
The rest : an emptier week would have left more space for the one film that deserves it, The Three Faces of Eve, a serious treatment, with Lee I. Cobb as the doctor, of the recent book on a woman with three distinct natures—one dull, suppressed and permanently dejected; one flighty and occasionally vicious; the third a balanced, attractive woman without a memory. Joanne Woodward gives a magnificent performance as the three, turning from one to the other or to the third at a moment's notice so that, without a change of dress or position, she becomes, quite unmistakably, another person. A recent and very silly film on the same subject and with much the same sort of plot may make some people approach this with suspicion : it isn't in the same category at all. Director : Nunnally Johnson.
My Man Godfrey is a new version of a Thirties comedy, with David Niven as the distinguished butler in a millionaire's domestic madhouse and June Allyson as the kindly daughter with a taste for strays. Only mildly funny, but with a dated, genial attraction. Director : Henry Koster.
When The Little Hut was a play it was straight- forward triangular French farce on a desert island. As a film it is so, busy giving sops to the censor that its triangulation becomes embarras- sing. Stewart Granger and David Niven look mildly embarrassed themselves; Ava Gardner, in castaway underclothes, looks rather bored. Direc- tor : Mark Robson.
Without fuss or frills, and hardly coming across the footlights, Paul Czinner's The Bolshoi Ballet is a documentarily valuable record of the com- pany's Covent Garden season. As a piece of film-• making it seems hasty and unenterprising, but perhaps conditions made that inevitable.
ISABEL QUIGLY
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