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What brought on the rush for Kelly? Says Director Alfred Hitchcock, who worked with Grace in Dial M and Rear Window: "She is that rare thing in movies, a lady. She is a real actress. Not in the histrionic sense, but in a deeper sense. She's one of those people who fit into any leading-lady part. She has a youthful appearance photographically, but she is no child or juvenile in any sense. Ingrid Bergman has the same quality. It suggests intelligence."
Grace herself is the least articulate person on the subject of Grace Kelly. To newcomers she presents a fine if forbidding figure of a coolly aloof craftsman who saves herself for the cameras. "This is a time," she says, "when the movies are not looking for contract actresses, but for the right girl for the right part." A lot of Hollywood studios these days seem to believe that the right girl is Kelly.
Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (Dancigers & Ehrlich; United Artists), filmed in Mexico and directed by Spain's expatriate Luis (The Yowng and the Damned) Bunuel, is played to the hilt by Ireland's former Abbey Player Dan O'Herlihy. It will carry many a moviegoer back to the long afternoons of childhood when he pored over the pages of Daniel Defoe's classic.
Here, again, the storm-tossed mariner comes staggering through the surf to begin his 28 years of bitter exile on a desert island. At first, Crusoe rejoices in survival itself, then in the happy rescue of guns and supplies from his ship, wrecked on a nearby reef. With the ship's dog and cat, with a home abuilding and goats to tend, the castaway seems secure in his growing self-sufficiency. But fever comes, and he is finally racked by the even greater terrors of loneliness. Director Bunuel and Actor O'Herlihy are particularly fine in picturing the despair of a man alone. The suggestion of it comes in O'Herlihy's bemused fingering of the women's clothes that he has salvaged from the wreck; the note deepens with the death and burial of his companion, the dog; it breaks into wild orchestration as the crazed man runs to an echoing valley and there hurls the 23rd Psalm against the ringing hills solely to hear the answering sound of his own distorted voice. In a drunken revel, O'Herlihy re-creates in his cave all the roistering cheerfulness of an Elizabethan pub, but this ends, too, in a disillusion so great that he walks blindly into the surf, bearing aloft a blazing torch. When he drops the brand into the sea, it is as though his own humanity were extinguished.