The New Pictures

(3 of 3)

Nothing in the film is so fast and furious as one cleverly directed scene in which Isherwood, groaning with a hangover, is carried off like a corpse to the American's apartment. In no time at all the place is overrun with gay, gabbing souses, and everybody agrees that what poor old Isherwood needs is medical attention. In comes a huge, bulging masseur who carries the puny and protesting patient to a table where he is nearly pulverized. Before long, two funereal hydro-therapists enter and fill the bathtubs—one with scalding water, the other with cold. Efficient and precise, they lug Isherwood first to one tub, then to the other but his screams are scarcely heard above the loud glass clinks and boisterous chatter of the crowd. His last treatment is dealt out by a sinister, bearded ogre, who carries with him a kind of portable electric chair. As the party rages on, Isherwood's limp-wet body is strapped into the chair. The episode should go down in movie history as the most bizarre concoction since Un Chien Andalou (1929), when Surrealist Film Makers Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali threw an old mule's carcass across the tops of a couple of grand pianos and had the hero drag the whole shebang across the floor during a love scene.

Julie Harris is as frothy and exciting as a fresh bottle of champagne. Tossing her hands, her eyes and her lines about with abandon, she gives one of the finest performances of her career. Britain's Laurence (Romeo and Juliet] Harvey is just right as the embattled Isherwood, and Shelley Winters and Anton Diffring capably carry along the subplot. Director Henry Cornelius (Genevieve) had to contend with bad sound recording, but his achievement far outweighs the minor irritations.

Brimful as it is with sex, Camera has not yet won a seal of approval from Hollywood's Production Code office ("unacceptable in its present form"), but the Distributors Corp. of America still maintained that it would release the picture in Manhattan this week with or without the seal.