The New Pictures

Monday, Mar. 21, 1960
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Can-Can (Suffolk-Cummings; 20th Century-Fox). "Immoral!" blustered Russia's Nikita Khrushchev, after he saw a cabaret scene from the $6,000,000 cinemusical during his visit to Hollywood (TIME, Sept. 28, 1959). Encouraged by Critic Khrushchev's generous prerelease publicity and confident of the picture's substantial "production values"—Frank Sinatra, Shirley MacLaine, Maurice Chevalier, Louis Jourdan, Todd-AO, and some fulgid color photography—Fox decided to release Can-Can as a reserved-seat ($1.50-$3.50) attraction, and expects it to do as well as Gigi did on the same basis. Unhappily, many U.S. moviegoers will discover that Russian standards in these matters do not coincide with their own. Can-Can is not immoral. It is merely dull.

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The film only casually resembles the Broadway hit musical of 1953. To begin with, several of the songs are different. Since the Cole Porter score produced no more than two memorable tunes (I Love Paris, It's All Right with Me), Producer Jack Cummings shrewdly decided to ring in some old Porter favorites (You Do Something to Me, It Was Just One of Those Things, Let's Do It). But the old favorites don't make much sense in their new context, and, anyway, they are badly sung. Some of the dances are different, too: the cancan, as it is canned in this picture, is a more sanitary matter than the original Parisian routine—a noisy, sweaty predecessor of the striptease, with a name that is one of the more notorious puns in the French language.

What's more, the characters and the plot have got pretty well snarled up in the camera. Star Sinatra plays a Parisian avocat with the usual lively avocation, but his tired voice and gestures may suggest to moviegoers who have seen his recent films that Sinatrophy is setting in. Star MacLaine, who with better direction has handled herself like an American Kay Kendall, seems little better in this picture than a female Jerry Lewis.

In fact, the only thing really worth seeing is Juliet Prowse, a young South African hoofer who puts some twinkle in the stub-toed choreography. And the only thing really worth hearing is the crack that Frank flips back at Juliet when she whips a redoubtable hip in his direction.

"Don't point," he gasps. "It's rude."

Sink the Bismarck (20th Century-Fox).

The episode of the Bismarck was one of the more peculiar and dramatic sea fights of World War II. On May 21, 1941, the day after the German invasion of Crete, the 45,000-ton battleship Bismarck was reported steaming out of the Kattegat into the North Sea, escorted by the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen. Two days later, the pride of the Nazi navy was sighted speeding south toward the shipping lanes of the open Atlantic. Two British ships of the line engaged her. Bismarck quickly sank H.M.S. Hood, the biggest ship in the British battle fleet, and battered Prince of Wales so badly that she steamed off under a smoke screen.