The Matchmaker (Don Hartman; Paramount) is Shirley Booth, and no one can match her when she is on the middle-aged make. Waving her umbrella like a fairy godmother with a poltergeistic wand, she stumbles, rumbles and cannily bumbles her way through the title role of Thornton Wilder's 1956 stage success in a manner that moviegoers with a taste for old-fashioned American farce will have no trouble savoring.
As Mrs. Dolly Levi, a widow of parts, Actress Booth plays an erstwhile palm reader and dispenser of medicine oil whose present project is snaring Horace Vandergelder (Paul Ford), possibly the richest merchant in all Yonkers in 1884. Her mission is complicated by the merchant's preference for finance rather than romance. "Marriage," he snorts, "is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder." Even worse, the old skinflint seems set on marrying somebody young. Author Wilder's solution, which involves exploding tomato tins, a pair of Vandergelder's clerks uprooting the City of New York, a pretty milliner whose rival is purely mythical, and a demoniac dinner party, makes no sense at all—but does make scatterbrained nonsense.
Wilder and Scriptwriter John Michael Hayes coat this slapstick with lavish layers of roguish dialogue. If Actress Booth blinks at the camera and confides, "Money is like manure—it's not worth anything unless it's spread around," Actor Ford is there a moment later to lament: "Oh for the days when women were sold for a few cows." Chief Clerk Tony Perkins, who seems to be trying to recapture Jimmy Stewart's lost youth, paws the ground and in that familiar marble-mouthed drawl reckons that he might try kissing a girl: "I'm six foot two and a half tall; I've got to start some time." Replies Robert Morse, his shy fellow clerk: "I'm five foot five, so it isn't so urgent for me." Brought off at breakneck speed amidst a kaleidoscope of neck-breaking pratfalls, this chatter and unabashed clowning by all hands turn Matchmaker into a highly amusing farce.
The Defiant Ones (Stanley Kramer; United Artists). Throw together a couple of unknown film writers, an original screenplay never tested in bookstalls, on television or on the stage, a budget of less than $1,000,000 to cover the cost of old-fashioned black-and-white photography and monophonic sound, and what bubbles up? For Producer-Director Stanley Kramer, at 44 one of the most skillful chefs in the business, the result of putting such ingredients together is savory cinema, free of froth and sharply seasoned.
Kramer's recipe is to pick up a story shell of mollusk-like simplicity and crack it open almost raw to lay bare the flesh beneath. In Champion (1949), his hero was a heel who could hit, and would hit anybody to get to the top; in High Noon (1952), a lawman alone against four avenging gunslingers. The Defiant Ones, in terms of its plot, is equally spare: two men escape from a Southern chain gang and are hunted down by a sheriff and his posse. But from a stark, grimly witty script by Movie Newcomers Nathan E. Douglas and Harold Jacob Smith, Director Kramer makes a story of human understanding slowly carved out of two men's common violence, loneliness and desperation.
White-Boy Joker Jackson (Tony Curtis) and Black-Boy Noah Cullen (Sidney