Cinema: The New Pictures, Jan. 21, 1957

The New Pictures The Barretts of Wimpole Street

(M-G-M). In the past quarter-century, Poet Robert Browning and Poetess Elizabeth Barrett have become almost as famed a pair of lovers to U.S. audiences as Romeo and Juliet. And Elizabeth’s tyrannical father, who stood between them, has become as thoroughly hissed a villain as the contemporary theater has produced. The principal reason for the fame of all three is Rudolf Besier’s play, The Barretts of Wimpole Street. Liberally sprinkling the dialogue with quotations from the lovers’letters and poems, Playwright Besier applied the golden formula, love triumphs over tyranny, and for a climax had his bedridden heroine rescued from the sick room by her lover.

Because the play contained as much histrionics as history, it supplied Actress Katharine Cornell with a dashingly theatrical vehicle when she first played it on Broadway in 1931. Since then she has revived it twice on Broadway, besides road tours and a TV version. The present movie version is the second (the 1934 film starred Norma Shearer). It is still the romantic period piece it was, and though it seems a little tired for having been around so long, there is no apparent reason why it should not still attract large audiences. As the father, Sir John Gielgud is unrelentingly grim; as Browning, Bill Travers (in a wild change of pace from his muscle-bound Wee Geordie) is insistently romantic. The star this time is Jennifer Jones, who is pretty, not so healthy-looking as Norma Shearer, but not so convincing as Katharine Cornell.

The Great Man (Universal-International) is a corrosive, cynical comment on TV-Radio Row. It is directed with vigor and played with bounce, and though it is talky, the talk is amusingly semiliterate in the Madison Avenue manner. Adapted from the novel by Radioman Al Morgan, it focuses on the men who guide the stars of the TV-radio industry, holds them high to show how low they are, and growls: in this business, anything goes, even integrity—if it sells soap and toothpaste.

Whatever the merits of the argument, the pictorial demonstration is compelling. The Great Man pounces quickly on its subject matter and, from first image to last, never lets go. Aiming a screenful of bile at the industry in general, it releases its most acidulous contempt at a single personality, an “American idol.” Is it a roman a clef? Says Author Morgan: “No one has sued me yet.”

As the movie opens, the great man dies in an auto crash. A witheringly sardonic radio executive (Keenan Wynn) springs into action. The great man must be replaced. He picks Commentator Jose Ferrer, a promising gossipist on Manhattan night life who is at the halfway point to corruption, with ambition gnawing away at his remaining illusions. But before Ferrer can get the job, he must be okayed by the boss of the network (Dean Jagger).

Ferrer makes his pitch at a meeting of the network’s top brass, throwing them a soft sell, very sincere, about how he would conduct the full hour, coast-to-coast memorial show being planned for the dead man as “a portrait in sound of the common man magnified.” As the camera plays on the alert faces of the brass, each attentive but ready to cut off the speaker’s head at the first false note, it is plain that Ferrer’s fate is riding on the words he is improvising. When he finishes, the boss breaks the silence with three words: “I’ll buy it.” That throws the entire network behind Ferrer. He sets off with his tape recorder to find out from those who knew the great man best what he was really like.

Loved by “150 million of the Great Unwashed” who knew him on the air, the great man was loathed by those who knew him in the flesh. His wife never gave him a divorce, but let him stray at the end of a long leash. Among other places, he strayed into the boudoir of one of his singers (Julie London). Making love to him, she says, “was my way of paying a premium on my job insurance.” By the time the great man’s portrait is filled in by his pressagent (“I was paid to work for him, not to like him”), and by a simple, slightly ridiculous man who gave him his start—winningly played by Ed Wynn (“He was not a nice person”)—what emerges is “a glorified con man with his voice amplified.”

The dramatic question: Now that Commentator Ferrer knows what a monumental heel the great man was, will he turn the memorial show into a farce by doing a tearjerker or into a scandal by telling the truth? What he does is an improbable surprise, but well worth seeing.

Hollywood or Bust (Hal Wallis; Paramount) might be called a redundant pun. Like most Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis productions, the movie is a package job. It tidily wraps up some songs (by Dean), a few gags (by Jerry), a couple of dozen long-stemmed American beauties (in shorts), a lot of scenery (in VistaVision), and Anita Ekberg (in decolletage). The opportunity to display all these items begins when Jerry, an idiotic movie fan, sets out for Hollywood with Dean to meet Anita, the movie queen of his dreams. Stopping off in Las Vegas, Jerry gets his lucky feeling, parlays 25¢ into $10,000. That calls for a celebration. Surrounded by a tableful of beauties, the unspoiled boy raises a glass of champagne and cries: “Bottoms up!” Then, “Oh,” he quickly apologizes, “I forgot there were ladies present.”