Cinema: ... And Selected Shorts

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. . . And Selected Shorts

Two Men and a Wardrobe (Film Polski; Kingsley International). The camera looks out to sea. Gulls at rest, hardly a ripple. Suddenly, about 50 yards offshore, something breaks water. A fish? A submarine? No, just a wardrobe closet —large, well-made, decorated with a mirror, and carried by two dripping workingmen. Matter-of-factly, they lug the closet to the beach, jog the water out of their ears, pick the closet up again and head for the nearest city.

In town they try to board a streetcar; no wardrobe closets allowed. They try to make friends with a girl; when the wardrobe comes, she goes. They walk into a restaurant; sorry, no diners with closets. They try to rent a hotel room; already has wardrobes. Wearily they stagger on, wondering what sort of world has no room for people with wardrobe closets.

It is a cruel world. A man slaps his friend on the back with one hand, steals his wallet with the other. Four young punks stone a kitten to death and, when the wardrobe men protest, beat them up and break their mirror. When the closet-horses lie down to rest, a watchman drives them away with a stick. Heads bowed, they carry their burden back to the beach and quietly disappear into the sea.

This Kafkaotic little (15 minutes) fable, created by Raymond Polanski, a 19-year-old student at the Polish film school in Warsaw, mingles slapstick and horror with a screw-loose intensity seldom seen on screen since Emil Jannings went berserk in the last reel of The Blue Angel. What does it mean? Obviously nothing favorable to Poland's Communist society, but one guess is as good as another. One guess: in an evil world, virtue is an unbearable burden.

Islands of the Sea (Buena Vista), the most recent of Walt Disney's ain't-nature-grand operas, is a scrappy but fascinating "featurette" (28 minutes) that observes in full color the recondite fauna of several seldom-visited islands—the Galápagos, the Falklands and Guadalupe. Best shots: a hideous six-foot iguana leaps into the sea and instantly seems transmogrified into a silly wriggling pollywog in a milk bottle; an elephant seal, a 20-ft. blob of blubber, lies snoring into its floppy, built-in nosebag, looking from the neck up like none other than W. C. Fields; a 500-lb. Galápagos tortoise, that roughly resembles an old grey washtub upside down, changes abruptly, as a bright red bird lights on its back, to something curiously like a vast but remarkably chic Paris hat.