Cinema: Sir Alec the Less

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Situation Hopeless—But Not Serious. It is Germany, 1944. Allied bombs are splintering a village, and out of the smoke and rubble steps a helmeted, hesitant air-raid warden named Frick.

He is quickly identifiable as Alec Guinness, whose last really funny movie was The Horse's Mouth in 1959. Though billed as comedy, Hopeless flatly reestablishes that Sir Alec has taken leave of his sense of humor.

The plot, a slapdaptation of Actor-Author Robert Shaw's straight-faced novel The Hiding Place, gropes for drollery in the plight of two American airmen (Michael Connors and Robert Redford) who arrive in Germany by parachute and seek refuge in Prick's basement bomb shelter.

He finds them there, locks them up, and by the time the war ends the sentimental old wretch has grown so fond of his two prisoners that he decides to keep them as pets. Soberly, he fakes reports from the battle zones ("London is pffft") while the tumult of German reconstruction gets under way outside, sounding conveniently like the thunder of guns.

Five or six years pass. Cats beget kittens, frauleins beget G.I. issue from the Army of Occupation, bad jokes beget worse ones, and Producer-Director Gottfried Reinhardt (whose wife, Silvia, perpetrated the scenario) underscores the ironies by barreling in beer-hall background music. Actor Redford, a winner on Broadway (Barefoot in the Park), overworks his smooth, stagy comedy style to diminishing effect. Working even harder, Actor Connors curiously resembles those lacquered leading men who proliferated in Hollywood during the '40s while everyone else was away.

However, Hopeless rallies when Connors suddenly squawks: "I want a dame!" Soon Sir Alec is off to the local bawdyhouse. His milksop face a mask of maniacal innocence, he joins the Madam (Mady Rahl) on a couch so voluptuous that his feet don't quite reach the floor. Whereupon, he proceeds to terrify the poor jade with his doubletalking request for the services of a young lady who can entertain a couple of eccentric friends in total silence. Such pimping could hardly be improved upon, which shows just how far an unpleasant comedy has to go to find a moment of pure Guinness.