(3 of 3)
This slow (but not too slow) movement shapes the first part of the film and prepares the fevered pace of the second, with its prancing cannibals, the gibbering man Friday, and the swashbuckling English crew who at last return Crusoe to the world of men. Actor O'Herlihy plays with a steady brilliance. His joy at finding Friday (James Fernandez) turns quickly into a sort of lordly Colonel Blimpism as he sets their relationship as that of master and servant. Then his performance be- comes electrically charged with fear when he suspects Friday may murder him in his sleep and eat him. The savage and the civilized man have a long and uneasy road before they reach the haven of friendship. Like Defoe's original work, the movie is a neat mixture of moralizing and adventure, but, fortunately, the moralizing is never pompous or the adventuring ever dull.
Flame and the Flesh (MGM) works hard at making Lana Turner into a Hollywood version of a realistic Italian actress.
Like Anna Magnani, Lana screeches in anger and scratches herself; like Silvana Mangano. she slouches about in her slip and sprawls on a bed swatting flies; like Gina Lollobrigida, she has all the males in sight panting at her heels.
But just as Lana, turned brunette for the occasion, is synthetic Italian, so is the movie. Filmed in Naples, it deals with such elemental matters as poverty, sex and jealousy, but Flame is no more earthy than a surburban child patting mud pies. The plot has Lana, down to her last lira, befriended by a true-blue simpleton (Bonar Colleano), who promptly falls in love with her. Moving into his apartment, Lana falls in love, instead, with his roommate. Singer Carlos Thompson, who looks remarkably like TV's Ventriloquist Paul Winchell and acts with all the intensity of one of Winchell's puppets. Pier Angeli. Thompson's fiancee, is on hand to look bereft and beautiful, while such outlanders as Charles Goldner, Peter Illing and Eric Pohlman do their best to behave like Neapolitans.
After exchanging Vesuvian clinches and clichés, Lana and Carlos elope without benefit of clergy, and the camera trails dutifully after them, pausing only for Technicolored glances at such tourist resorts as Positano and Amalfi. At long last, Lana's heart of gold rings true: she nobly sends her lover back to his roommate and his hand-wringing bride-to-be. Then, in the unmistakably Italo-American manner of Jimmy Durante, Lana walks off alone into the night, her head held high and going—as the synopsis puts it—"who knows where?"
* Father Kelly, also an expert oarsman, won the Olympic singles in Antwerp in 1920; son John, a champion like his father, took first prize twice (in 1947 and 1949) in the famed Diamond Sculls at Henley, England.