Cinema: The New Pictures, Jun. 29, 1959

Middle of the Night (Sudan; Columbia) transforms an honest but clumsy play by Paddy Chayefsky into a cruelly beautiful and moving film, a story of life and love as a man grows older. The man (Fredric March) is a clothing manufacturer—shrewd, hardworking, decent. At 56, still “a vigorous man with normal appetites,” still fairly attractive to women, he finds himself a widower. What to do with the rest of his life? At first he simply works, works, works. After a while he starts spending time at his married daughter’s house, playing with the baby. Then one day his pretty, 24-year-old receptionist (Kim Novak), a nice, mixed-up kid whose marriage has recently gone on the rocks, takes a fit of hysterics, and the boss decides to give her a little fatherly attention.

His attention soon takes a different turn. He finds himself hanging around the neighborhood she lives in, waiting like a schoolboy for a chance to pass her on the street. “Jerk!” he warns himself. “What are you doing?” One night he gets up enough courage to ask her for a date. After three or four of them, he knows he has it bad. She knows it, too, and tries to break off the affair before things go too far. But she needs to be loved as much as he needs to love.

Soon he begins to tell himself that he wants desperately to marry her. “I don’t want to be a middle-aged man keeping a girl somewhere.” But he is old enough to know it would never work out. And then again: “Is it fair to have children at my age?” What’s more, he is aware that the girl really wants a father more than she wants a lover. Every counsel of experience and common sense requires that he let her go—so he asks her to marry him. And she accepts.

The trouble begins at about that point. Secretly, she is not at all sure she loves the man; she is not at all sure what love is. And he runs into a hornet’s nest at home. His sister, who has kept house for him since the death of his wife, sobs bitterly: “My whole life, my whole life I gave up!” And his book-smart daughter, blissfully unaware of her own father fixation, sweetly explains to him why his behavior is “neurotic.”

He refuses to listen to reason from anyone; but he cannot entirely ignore the warning voice of fear. Does he really love the girl? Does he, at his age, really want to live the emotional life of a young man? Wouldn’t he be wiser to act his age and somehow find his peace? In the happy-unhappy ending, the victim-hero of the drama accepts at life’s hands the lesser evil, the larger hope.

What most strikingly meets the eye in this movie is the profound and professional performance of Fredric March. Seldom have youth and crabbed age lived together in one face with so much suffering and meaning. Amazingly, Actress Novak shows up not too badly, despite the distinguished company, and the credit for that seems to belong chiefly to Director Delbert (Marty, The Bachelor Party) Mann. Playwright-Scriptwriter Chayefsky, of course, is ultimately responsible for the passionate sympathy and painful practical wisdom of the film, which is a work of greater cogency than his Broadway playscript and of deeper maturity than his Marty. In fact, it is the first sustained passage of mature feeling and thinking that has so far appeared in the course of Chayefsky’s lucrative celebration of the commonplace.

John Paul Jones (Warner), a film biography of the first great captain of the U.S. Navy, is a full-color saga of the sea on which the moviemakers have lavished $4,000,000 and infinite care. For the filming of Jones’s most famed sea fight, the Serapis and the Bonhomme Richard were rebuilt timber for timber. For the scenes at the French and Russian courts, Madrid’s Palacio Real was rented from the Franco government. The script is written in precise period prose (“No Scot is a stranger to the cause of freedom, sirrah!”), and scene after scene looks like a meticulous illustration of a textbook paragraph; the frame that depicts the signing of the Declaration of Independence is an animated reproduction of the John Trumbull painting.

Against such an authentic background, the spectator naturally expects to see the authentic facts of the hero’s life. But no. In the picture Jones is portrayed as a slim-hipped, sleek-cheeked prettyboy (Robert Stack); in real life he was a scrawny runt with an angry, windburned face. In the picture he is a noble, unselfish, tenderhearted humanitarian; in real life, though brave and strongwilled, he was vain, ambitious, obsequious to his betters, arrogant with his underlings, and just as cruel as the next ship’s captain of his day—his idea of kindness was to let a man keep his shirt on while he was flogged.

In their doggedly unimaginative attempt to make Jones a better picture, the moviemakers have chiefly succeeded in making Jones a duller man. Still, the picture does present one splendid scene: the battle between the Serapis and the Bonhomme Richard. In this episode Director John Farrow presents in about ten minutes a shocking re-enactment of one of the ghastliest engagements in the history of warfare on water, a hand-to-hand, blood-slopping brawl in which hundreds of Americans and Englishmen were killed or wounded in less than four hours, and in which victory, in the words of Naval Historian A. S. Mackenzie, was “wholly and solely due to the immovable courage of Paul Jones.”

Say One for Me (20th Century-Fox). “If you decide to swim the Channel,” the show boy (Robert Wagner) murmurs to the show girl (Debbie Reynolds) as she parades downstage in her bathing suit, “I’d like to handle the grease job.” Debbie is “a nice, churchgoin’ mouse,” and she brings out the tomcat in Wagner. He gives chase. But before he can get his paws on her, he is chewed up by Debbie’s watchdog—a priest (Bing Crosby) of “the players’ parish,” who is described as “a Milton Berle with candles,” and who cheerily refers to early Mass as “my late late late show.” In the end, of course, the mouse catches the tomcat, and the watchdog reads their marriage lines.

Like an animated cartoon? In a way, it is—like an unusually clever and appealing one. Producer-Director Frank Tashlin (Geisha Boy) was once a cartoonist, and he is still a master of the bold, broad, crudely expressive stroke. He splashes the DeLuxe color around with a free hand and makes the most of a coony script by Robert O’Brien, in which the even flow of sentiment is tactfully interrupted by sassy little ripples of rough dialogue (“I couldn’t stand to see anyone going to bed without a pizza”; “I never take money from women—even if I’ve earned it”). Director Tashlin also gets some graceful footwork out of Actress Reynolds, some reasonably effective Sinatra-la-la out of Wagner, and he even squeezes a few perfunctory groans out of the Old Groaner himself.

Unfortunately, the film also makes an aggressive attempt to combine religion and vaudeville—one of Hollywood’s favorite marriages of commercial convenience—and the attempt sometimes offends both propriety and common sense. But whenever the moviemakers stop trying to prove that God is on the side of the biggest production numbers, Say One for Me starts to look like one of the brightest and sprightliest little cinemusicals of the season.