Cinema: Summer’s Fair Fare

The spring’s run of films shot in Europe (Mein Kampf, Kanal, The Bridge) has been about as jolly as the” spring’s run of speeches at the disarmament talks. But for viewers who can let Joe Alsop take the hindmost, the summer’s imports promise to be less apocalyptic. Three new comedies for those with sense enough to come in out of the reality:

Romanoff and Juliet (made in Italy for Universal-International) presents Peter Ustinov’s hopeful supposition that love, if given a chance, could make the world stop going around with a missile on its shoulder. Ustinov plays the President of Concordia, a postage-due-stamp principality with no prince and no principles. At the U.N., given a chance to cast the tie-breaking vote on an important amendment to an amendment, Ustinov abstains because he cannot understand the diplomatic bafflegab in which it is written. The Russians and the Americans present ultimatums: accept massive aid, or else. But dollars and rubles would wreck the Concordian economy, which has operated smoothly for hundreds of years because the money it circulates is worthless. The Concordian leader counters by promoting a romance between Igor Romanoff (John Gavin), son of the Russian ambassador, and Juliet Mouls-worth (Sandra Dee), daughter of the American ambassador.

Ustinov’s translation of play to screenplay retains the Broadway comedy’s assets (the idea is cute) and liabilities (the idea is cute). Asked to laugh once again at the same back-slapping Americans and tractor-worshipping Russians who have populated every cold war farce, the viewer may well decide that what the world needs even more than international accord is some new international jokes. But the Ninotchka-era jokes are presented with considerable spirit, and Actors Gavin and Dee, the missile-crossed lovers, are cuddly as puppies. Writer-Director Ustinov gives himself the best lines and delivers them with practiced waggery. When the town-hall clock goes out of order, he laments that “our national tragedy is that we have been occupied by every nation except the Swiss.”

The Cow and I (Cyclope; Zenith International) gives French Comedian Fernandel a three-quarter-ton co-star who can mug as well as he can, and certain questions at once arise. Will Fernandel let himself be cowed? Does the beautiful Marguerite make people eyes at him? The answer: yes.

The story of this gentlest of war films is true, or so its producers claim: a French soldier working in a German prison farm escapes, making himself invisible by carrying a bucket and borrowing a cow, a two-tone job with fetching eyelashes. The two set out for the French border 400 miles away. The arrangement works beautifully; Marguerite feeds Fernandel when he is hungry, and he tells stories to her when she is bored. The Germans never tumble. Eventually they reach the Rhine, and by this time Fernandel and Marguerite are in love. All the bridges have been bombed, and tearfully he tells her that she must stay behind, “where you know the customs and the language.”

Director Henri Verneuil has wisely let his laughs come naturally, and the tone is, in the phrase of the women’s magazines, heartwarming. Only hopelessly carnivorous viewers will refuse to take the pledge with Fernandel when, reunited briefly with Marguerite at film’s end, he tells her, “I will never eat beef again.”

Man in the Moon (Michael Relph; Trans-Lux) is a noodly British farce made by a crew of subversives who have obviously heard more than they care to hear about astronauts and rocket scientists. It seems that the National Atomic Research, Spaceship Testing and Information Bureau (NARSTI) wants to test its new moonship with a guinea pig before sending up a crew of expensively trained cosmonauts. He must be a human guinea pig, because a guinea-pig guinea pig would be an affront to the animal-doting British public. NARSTI’s choice is a cheerful clod (Kenneth More) who has been fired from his job as a lab animal for common-cold researchers because he is too healthy to interest any germs. More is set to training with the cosmonauts.

A young lady (Shirley Anne Field) whose profession requires her to leap out of cakes at stag parties without icing distracts the hero for a time. But at last the moonship is fired. The scientists wait tensely for news. After two days it comes. Rocket haters will be cheered to learn that the first thing More sees at his landing site is a Heinz baked-bean can.

Motor-Scooter Mellers

The Cheaters (Silver-Zebra; Continental) and Frantic (Times Film Co.). French moviemakers have lately had the notion that any film in which the young wear duffel coats, drink too much and charge about on motor scooters belongs to the Nouvelle Vague, the French New Wave, and should therefore be as fashionable as sinning after lunch. Two recent arrivals resound to the phoot-phoot of scooters, but they nonetheless belong to the most ancienne of vagues—bad films. Cheaters is a solemn exercise in which Jacques Charrier, a pretty young man married to Brigitte Bardot, and some friends behave with what they fancy is abandon: they dig le jazz, say “so longue” to each other, and crack up cars. All that need be said of Cheaters is that toward the end of it, after a crackup, a surgeon utters that immemorial line from the U.S. Old Wave: “I’m sorry. There was nothing more we could do.”

Frantic is a slow-moving melodrama directed by Louis Malle, who filmed The Lovers. Blonde Jeanne Moreau, who charged The Lovers with her intense, weathered sensuality, is the.star, and the plot at first seems to be that of a satisfactory thriller: Jeanne and her lover plot the killing of her husband, a rich industrialist, but during the getaway the lover gets trapped overnight in an automatic elevator (an authentic French touch). Perhaps things went wrong when Trumpeter Miles Davis was hired to do the sound track; trumpeters are doubtful assets, and should never require feature billing. Director Malle has confined all the action of his film to the classical 24 hours, and he succeeds; the viewer leaves the theater convinced that the film has indeed been unwinding for a full day.