Cinema: View from the Sofa

Cold Wind in August (Troy; Aidart), a rutty melodrama about a thirtyish stripteaser (Lola Albright) who falls in love with a 17-year-old janitor’s son (Scott Marlowe), does not merely invite cynicism, it drags cynicism in off the street and loosens its tie. Obviously, the film will be a financial success, because it is loaded with skin-on-skin sex. No cynicism here, nor in the observation that part of the film’s distinct, if flawed, artistic success is due to a tight budget.

What curdles the viewer’s admiration is the suspicion that the film also profits by its lack of clever camerawork, imaginative direction (Alexander Singer, a former producer of television commercials, is responsible) or well-plotted story. In this almost total vacuum, there is nothing at all to get in the way of a superb job by Lola Albright, a 37-year-old blonde known chiefly for having played Peter Gunn’s girl friend on TV, and a performance almost as good by Marlowe, a 23-year-old TV actor. They play their parts—she has had three bad marriages and knows the wild luck of her new affair; he thinks this sort of thing will continue for the rest of his life. The cardboard plot grinds on to the boy’s inevitable discovery of what his true love does for a living. When they break up, her grief is touching, and so is his ignorance. It should be added that Writer Burton Wohl’s dialogue is excellent, even though his story is deficient. The lines have the unlovely clack of reality, and hearing Actors Albright and Marlowe say them is closer to hiding under the sofa than anything else in films this summer.