Cinema: Also Showing

Game of Love (Franco-London; Times Film Corp.) is a good little French picture based on a 1923 novel by Colette called Le Blé en Herbe. The typically Colettish plot: a 16-year-old boy named Phil (Pierre-Michel Beck) and his mother share a summer home on the Brittany beach with 15-year-old Vinca (Nicole Berger) and her family. The coltish youngsters love their summer lives, although, as they emerge from childhood, they begin to feel the prickly pain of petty jealousies. Into Phil’s, life there comes a mature woman (Edwige Feuillère) who at length welcomes him, curious, experimental and bold, to her bed. Having taught the boy how to be a man, she gently sends him back to Vinca. In a haystack, the boy and girl fumble at love and, as the summer wanes and they prepare to return to Paris, realize that they have sadly closed the door on childhood. Director Claude Autant-Lara, who covered somewhat the same ticklish territory in Devil in the Flesh (TIME, March 21, 1949), this time has produced not so much a pathetic portrait of adolescence as a melancholy valentine to the memory of those troubling years.