Cinema: Imports, Jul. 25, 1960

U.S. moviegoers last week could choose from a wildly mixed bag of foreign films: Operation Amsterdam (Rank; 20th Century-Fox) is what someone once described as an “on-the-run-in-a-raincoat” film. It is not hard to think of half a dozen British pictures like it that were better. But the film is enjoyable enough, largely because Eva Bartok, a dark-haired girl of great beauty, is generally on view. The time is 1940, just before the Germans swept over Holland, and the caper is to collect all of Amsterdam’s industrial diamonds and spirit them off to London. Peter Finch, Alexander Knox and Tony Britton are the raincoat wearers, and it should surprise no one that a good deal of blood and bedlam intervenes before they get the job done. For admirers of internal combustion, there is a grand old Mercedes roadster that is almost as pretty as Actress Bartok.

The Idiot (Mosfilm; 20th Century-Fox) is the sixth of seven Russian films to be sent to the U.S. under the terms of last year’s film-exchange agreement (the U.S.S.R. got ten U.S. films, including Marty and Roman Holiday}. It is difficult to see why it was exported. It may be that Russians genuinely admire that style of mummery in which the white of an actor’s eye is always visible, while the pupil occasionally rolls out of sight. At any rate, Dostoevsky’s amorphous novel of a young prince whose saintly behavior merely confuses his feral companions has once again proved to be unfilmable. The 1948 French version at least had the advantage of a magnificent portrayal of Prince Myshkin by the late Gerard Philipe, who was almost unknown at the time. Like everyone else in the Russian film, the present Myshkin, Yuri Yakovlev, acts at the top of his voice, generally while striding up and down in a pattern that would be understandable if he were carrying bagpipes. A good deal of the plot, including the murder of Nas-tasia Filipovna, has been left out, presumably for clarity. What is left never becomes very clear, and the impression is that the subtitles should not be blamed.

The Threepenny Opera (Brandon Films) is a re-release of the German musical satire made in 1931 by Director G. W. Pabst and destroyed—or so it was thought—soon afterward by the Nazis.

The present version was fitted together from pieces of several prints discovered after a long search of Europe. It is unquestionably an antique, with scratchy sound, uncertain lighting and a mannered kind of acting carried over from the silent films.. But it is not the sort of antique that must be watched with embarrassment. Lotte Lenya, as Jennie, is gawkily charming, and such Kurt Weill-Bert Brecht songs as Mack the Knife and Pirate Jenny retain their peculiar combination of sentiment and cynicism, even when filtered through English subtitles. Viewers who have seen the English stage version that has played for several years in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village will notice differences; the film, for some reason, has fewer songs, and its mockery of capitalism is more savagely direct. The stage play rewards the outlaw Mack the Knife for his evil deeds merely with a title and a pension; in the film. Mackie Messer (Rudolph Forster) becomes the director of a bank. As Peachum’s beggars prepare to break up a coronation parade (Threepenny Opera owes its inspiration to John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, and the scene is London), someone remarks: “The rich have hard hearts -but weak nerves.” The line is pure Brecht. He devoted his life to rattling those nerves, and never did he do it with less effect and more charm than in Threepenny Opera.