Cinema: The New Pictures, Jul. 15, 1957

Loving You (Paramount) is an authorized pseudo biography of the professional career of Elvis Presley. The only substantial departure from fact is that the movie’s Deke Rivers is a clean-living Texas orphan, whereas Elvis is actually a clean-living Tennessee homebody with a real mom and pop. The big pitch in Loving You is that Deke, wide-eyed and unspoiled, is victimized by a predatory lady pressagent (Lizabeth Scott) and a scheming bandleader (Wendell Corey). But the harder the venal two try to cheapen and exploit this naive lad, the richer he gets. He just can’t avoid it.

The loose parallels in Deke’s and Presley’s careers will set off happy squeals among the juke-box brigade. Some cheer-jerking implications: Elvis was sort of born with a guitar in his hands, a Hydra-Matic shift in his hips, a fog in his throat—and he never recovered. Elvis will fight bullies only if extremely provoked because bad publicity draws standing-room-only audiences. Elvis don’t drink or smoke, and he don’t like girls that do.

In tracing its hero’s rise from beer-delivery boy to the threshold of greatness, the film applies whitewash so thickly that the coated object loses all shape. About the only big event in Presley’s real life not touched upon by Loving You is his invasion of Hollywood. This is understandable. To be true to its own brand of ballyhoo, the film would have to show Elvis—modest and shy fellow that he is—rejecting all offers to lend himself to Hollywood commercialism.

Love in the Afternoon (Billy Wilder; Allied Artists) suggests that the Big Bad Wolf can be devoured by Little Red Ridinghood—provided she plays her cad right. Romancer Claude Anet’s 1924 novel Ariane, transplanted in the movie from Moscow to Paris, originally fascinated a generation of French schoolgirls, inspiring them to daydreams of enticing worldly seducers into marriage beds. A German film version (1931) with Elisabeth Bergner as its cunning heroine sent many a lovelorn Mädchen into similar transports.

Hollywood, turning its best scene-milking hand to this bittersweet trifle, called upon the services of Producer-Director Wilder. Squeezing the last drop of champagne from his vintage script of springtime in Paris, Co-Scripter Wilder achieves many effervescent effects. But his last-minute cascade of bubbles, belly laughs and bathos is overstretched and often repetitious.

Gary Cooper, Hollywood’s past master at playing variations on the theme of oneself, is this time cast as a lass-grabbing U.S. tycoon just Gary’s age (56). He perfunctorily amasses millions while concentrating chiefly on his globe-girdling conquests; he only counts his assignations, and his corporations take care of themselves. While working on a big deal during his annual Paris fling, Casanova Cooper is rudely interrupted by mysterious, wide-eyed Ariane (Audrey Hepburn). His big deal’s husband, warns Audrey, lurks with a loaded revolver just outside Cooper’s Ritz suite. Thus saved from a drilling, grateful Gary turns his wolfish attentions to Audrey.

Through many a frustrating tryst, he fails to learn even her name, or that her papa is a private eye (played straight and sweetly by old Boulevardier Maurice Chevalier) who specializes in finding missing persons in strange beds. With sneaky access to papa’s files, little Audrey knows all about Cooper’s amorous escapades.

Poor Gary naturally winds up hiring Detective Chevalier to detect his own daughter’s identity. When the boudoir bounder expresses surprise that Chevalier recognizes him on sight, Maurice snorts: “Do I know you! Does an art student know Picasso?” Toward the end, aboard a Riviera-bound train, the lecher and the lass appear to be headed for a matrimonial blowout in Nice that will dwarf anything ever seen in Monaco. “Love in the Evening.” a possible sequel, might answer the difficult question of whether the marriage will last.

Silk Stockings (MGM) is a lisle version of a fairly spirited musicomedy in turn woven over an old velveteen original. Ninotchka, the 1939 movie that lured filmgoers with a come-hither solution to the riddle of the Swedish sphinx—”Garbo laughs!” If Cyd Charisse, a twinkle-toed dancer and adequate actress, were by casting tradition less a laugher, this movie might siren: “Charisse chortles!” Despite a fallout of high-radiation talent, Ninotchka’s latter-day mutations are not always for the best. Where Garbo, as a lady Bolshevik enjoying her decline in the West, merrily evolved. Cyd mostly revolves, beautifully, but not enough for ballet and too much for comedy. The theme of the defecting Communist, the iron-petticoated tovarish succumbing to pleasurable decadence, is the same old hoary story of peekaboo among Marx’s whiskers. Treated seriously, it is a saga of hairbreadth escapes and close shaves. It might have been funnier were it not that good old 1939 was so long ago.

It is all very droll that the film’s heroine, Ninotchka, is divested by the charms of Paris and reaccoutered, mentally and sartorially, by the brash American movie producer (Fred Astaire). The witty dialectic (by George S. Kaufmann, Leueen MacGrath and Abe Burrows), the fair-to-maudlin songs (by Cole Porter), the arch, megaphoned direction (by Rouben Mamoulian), all tend to promote the wishful idea that the Soviet Union could be outflanked by a simple clobbering with Sears, Roebuck catalogues—or a rain of silk stockings. But comedy is not always its own excuse, and Hollywood should keep abreast of the times enough to know when not to spoof a superannuated spoof.

All the same, the movie, as a loose-sewn patchwork of songs, dances and wisecracks, is a diverting piece of summer drive-in fare.