Cinema: Hell’s Belles

Strumpets are always a surplus commodity on the cinemarket. but currently the U.S. movie audience is suffering an unusually acute embarrassment of bitches.

Girl with a Suitcase (Titanus; Ellis Films) is the latest hot dish from Italy: Claudia Cardinale. Billboarded all over Europe as the sexcessor to MM and BB, CC is an RR employee’s daughter who at 22 has won pp. of publicity but shows scarcely a cc. of talent. However, her other dimensions (37-23-37) are more impressive, and she has the sort of soft wide sulky mouth that champagne glasses were designed to fit.

In Suitcase, CC plays one of those girls who tell themselves they are in show business, even though they only perform in bed. The film describes, sometimes quite affectingly, how the girl painfully strips off not her clothes but her illusions.

As the story begins, the pretty ragazza is running away from her bandleader boy friend with a highborn brat who promises to make her a movie star. After five days of fun and games, the young nob suddenly gets bored, takes what the Italians call English leave. Furious, the girl pursues him, finds out where he lives, rings his doorbell. Appalled, the playboy tells his 16-year-old brother (Jacques Perrin) to answer the door and get rid of the dame. But the boy is everything big brother is not: innocent, sensitive, idealistic. He is horrified at his brother’s subhumanity, dazed by the young woman’s luminous loveliness. He carries her suitcase to a hotel, lends her money, falls gradually, wonderingly in love. In the end, love ends for the boy, while for the girl something much more terrible than love begins.

The boy is the best thing in the film. In the delicate, spiritual face of Actor Perrin, the camera finds a compelling image of eternal youth, of the doomed and beautiful son-lover of the legends. Actress Cardinale seems almost ludicrously crude by comparison. But her faults are not all her fault. Director Valeric Zurlini, a well-known cheesecake vendor, incessantly interrupts the subtle drama of the script to turn his lens on Claudia’s chest. He obviously intends the show to be a bust. And so, in the last analysis, it is.

Claudelle Inglish (Warners) is a common Dixie doxy. She starts out poor but honest, the daughter (Diane McBain) of a tenant farmer (Arthur Kennedy) in the Deep (read shallow) South. Jilted by the boy she loves, the girl decides to get even. She paints her lips, she flips her hips. For miles around, the gay young devils (and some not so young) answer this summons from one of hell’s belles. They bring her presents. She pays off. Her mother (Constance Ford), fearing that the poor child will come a-sharecropper, advises her to marry a rich man (Claude Akins), but when the girl laughs him off as a “fat old fool,” the mother is only too ready to offer him consolation. In the end, two of the daughter’s boy friends fight, and one of them is killed. Stricken with guilt, the wench cries out: “Oh Papa! It’s all my fault!” It isn’t, though. Hovelist Erskine Caldwell’s breast-selling book, on which the film is based, negotiates such a ruttish stretch of his notorious Tobacco Road that anybody who tries to follow him is sure to get stuck in the muck.

Ada (Avon-Chalmar; M-S-M)isafallen woman (Susan Hayward) who pulls herself up from bawdyhouse to governor’s mansion by her garter straps. One election year in Louisiana, she entertains a cotton-pickin’, git-tar-strummin’ candidate for Governor (Dean Martin), who so deeply appreciates her “campaign contribution” that he asks her to marry him. She does, and when he wins in November the scarlet woman suddenly becomes the first lady.

A forgiving soul, the reformed hussy determines to do good to the society that has done her wrong, but she soon discovers to her horror that politics is perceptibly dirtier than prostitution. The state is owned by a pawky old politician (Wilfrid Hyde White) who rules it with an iron hand—strongly magnetized to pick up loose change. When the new Governor tries to yank the old boy’s hand out of the till, a bomb explodes in his car. While he is recovering, the missus serves as acting Governor, and by the time she is through acting, the rascals are out and the state remolded nearer to the tart’s desire.

A cute idea—maybe too cute. But the screenplay, worked up by Arthur Sheek-man and William Driskill from a novel (Ada Dallas) by Wirt Williams, develops it into a pleasant political comedy, and Daniel (Butterfield 8) Mann directs the show with tact and skill. He makes the most of Martin’s charm, the least of Hayward’s flim-flamboyance. And in Ralph Meeker he viciously personifies the police power in a native Fascist regime. But it is Actor White—a British trouper usually cast as a potty colonel, a flaccid vicar, or a dear old rose fiend in Sussex—who domi nates the audience as a waving cobra fascinates a mouse. With his small, reptilian grin and oily suppleness, he conveys the immemorial image of the big political snake, the everlasting reason why you can’t fight city hall.