Cinema: The New Comedies

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In short, milady is ruddy well ready for a bit of fun when an American oillionaire (Robert Mitchum) plonks himself into her roped-off living room and informs her that she has "very lovely eyes." Intrigued, she lets him go sofa and no farther. But a week later in London they consummate an entirely satisfactory international relationship. Meanwhile, back at the castle, her husband gets wind of what has happened. "Adultery," he announces firmly, "is not sufficient grounds for divorce. I want her back." It takes him an hour of screen time to get her back, and that hour contains the silliest duel of the cinema season and some of its nuttier repartee. In patches, Grass needs some determined cutting, but whenever the script lapses, Director Stanley Donen (Indiscreet) is right there with a cute shot. And the actors—with the lamentable exception of Mitchum, who does not seem to realize that the best way to play a cartoon American is simply to play himself—rescue scene after scene with a deft cliche of gesture or a delightful bit of business. Actress Kerr is milady to the Cambridge quaver. Jean Simmons, a wildly inspired comedienne (Guys and Dolls), plays a society playgirl so dumb she "can't play Scrabble with grown-up people"—but is she ever a whiz when it comes to adding money and subtracting husbands.

Actor Grant, as usual, is the mainstay of the show. He is the only funnyman in movie history who has maintained himself for close to 30 years as a ranking romantic star. He wears only one expression: the bland mask of drawing-room comedy. He plays only one part: the well-pressed, elegantly laundered masculine existence that suddenly finds itself splashed by love's old sweet ketchup. About that situation Grant has nothing important to say, no social or moral message to deliver. He creates in a vacuum of values; he is a technician only—but he is a technician of genius.

A Breath of Scandal (Paramount). "Didn't your father inherit part of Poland?" "Mmm. Lost it at Monte Carlo." "Never mind. I hear it wasn't the best part." Olympia, the palace farce by Ferenc Molnar on which this film is based, was loaded with that sort of charmingly phony antechamber chatter — Molnar liked to write as though he got it straight from the Habsburg lip. Unhappily, Breath of Scandal has inherited only a small part (and not necessarily the best part) of Molnar's small talk while retaining the only elements of his silly little operetta plot. In the picture, Habsburg princess (Sophia Loren) meets Pittsburgh peasant (John Gavin) instead of hussar. Anyhow, the color is peachy-keen and the sets are magnificent ; Scandal was shot on location in five Austrian palaces (Belvedere, Hofburg, Kreuzenstein, Pallavicini, Schönbrunn). Maurice Chevalier is bearable, and Isabel Jeans, as Sophia's sappy-sophisticated mother, almost makes up for the unfortunate presence of John Gavin, an actor who looks as though he ought to be called Soapstone Hudson.