• U.S.

Cinema: The New Pictures, Feb. 24, 1958

6 minute read
TIME

The Gift of Love (20th Century-Fox). “Don’t adopt me,” lisps the plain little girl at the orphanage to the lady who has come looking for a foster child. “I don’t usually work out.” Her eyes are sort of squinty and set a little too close together. Her teeth are pretty scarce. How can the lady resist? Certainly a lot of moviegoers will not be able to. Evelyn Rudie is the most fetching representation of daddy’s darling that Hollywood has come up with since Margaret O’Brien retired undefeated as hopscotch champion of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and does she ever know how to steal a scene! In fact, she steals the picture.

Trouble is, the picture is hardly worth stealing. Based on a Good Housekeeping story by Nelia Gardner White, it assumes in its audience an unquestioning acceptance of those articles of faith that have made women’s-magazine fiction what it is today: I) men are such babies; 2) women know best; 3) children are cute; 4) marriage is the continuation of childhood by other means; 5) home is where the hurt is, and the most practical thing a woman can put in her trousseau is a crying towel; 6) love makes up for everything, even for not helping with the dishes; 7) death does not really make any difference if two people truly love each other—a competent woman can manage a man from the grave almost as well as she can from the breakfast table.

The woman (Lauren Bacall) in this picture is very competent indeed, and when she discovers that she is going to die of a heart ailment, she calmly begins to arrange her husband’s domestic future for him. Naturally she does not tell him about her condition—men are such babies.

The first thing he will need, she decides, is somebody to keep him interested in life. Since they have no children, she adopts one. Women know best, of course, so never mind whether the woman in this case is really doing her husband a favor—let alone the child. Still, children are cute, and this one is ever so. But the husband, a brain who does basic research in theoretical physics, does not seem to enjoy living in the same house with a walking edition of Bright Sayings, and it takes a special visitation by the ghost of Lauren Bacall, accompanied on the sound track by a heavenly choir, to win him over. This is probably the nicest thing Hollywood has said for years about a heavy thinker.

The Brothers Karamazov (MGM) is Hollywood’s retelling of the Dostoevsky classic. Like all great works of art, the novel has an elusive way of being all things to all men. Psychologists have hailed it the profoundest of all psychological novels; diplomats still read it as a key to Russian life and temperament. To historians, it is a bomb of a book that shattered the complacent pane through which 19th century Europe surveyed the weather of the soul. To the religious, it is a prophecy of the apocalypse that has been visited upon the 20th century, and a sovereign medicine to the malady of unbelief. But to Hollywood, it makes none of these points. What Dostoevsky was really trying to express, according to this picture, is a simple, eternal verity: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.

The boy in this version is Yul Brynner, and the girl is somebody millions of U.S. moviegoers have been eagerly waiting to see: Germany’s Maria Schell (TIME, Dec. 30). They will hardly be disappointed in her luminous good looks, but they will probably be disappointed in her Grushenka. Like almost everything else about this picture, she has been spectacularly mishandled by Director Richard Brooks. Dostoevsky’s heroine was a fascinating collusion of incompatibles—snaky cunning and dovelike innocence, “peculiar oversweetness” and “infernal curves.” Yet in Actress Schell’s portrayal “the queen of all she-devils” is effaced by the “pure and shining.” and the cat can hardly be seen for the kitten.

As for the story, no doubt some sort of simplifying formula had to be applied. A diagram of the plot, as it traces the tangled affairs of a father and his four grown sons in a provincial town in Russia, looks like the floor plan of the Kremlin. But why, if a formula was necessary, did M-G-M overlook the story gimmick that Dostoevsky himself used so masterfully? Karamazov is literature’s greatest whodunit, but the moviemakers tip the murderer’s hand before it commits the crime. Suspense collapses, and with it most of the moviegoer’s interest.

Or why, once the lovestory pattern was laid on, was the novel not strictly cut to fit it? Instead, almost all the important facts of the story are preserved, almost all the major scenes are shown. But there are so many things to cover—even in a running time of 2 hr. 26 min.—that the movie does not seem to be telling a story so much as reciting a list.

It may be too much to hope that Hollywood should capture the Dostoevskian mood of borderline psychosis—the hysterical religiosity, the manic dissipations, the powerful undertow of hypocrisy and crime. But it is startling to see Dostoevsky’s village portrayed as a sort of sleepy little cowtown out of a John Wayne western, where all the philosophical agony of 19th century Russia is reduced to words of one syllable, where the meanest thing anybody does is grab a pretty girl or kill a villain, and where the local holy man looks like Russia’s answer to Gabby Hayes.

The vulgarization is abetted by a major mistake in style. Dostoevsky’s mood is chiaroscuro, touched with a few sour yellows and sick greens and morbid purples. The picture bursts upon the screen in a Metrocolored blaze. Later, when they make an effort to match their colors to the novel’s atrabilious atmosphere, the moviemakers overdo the job. Let a character be melancholy, and the very air about him turns a sort of arsenical green; let another be furious, and the air turns cinnabar red—an effect that seems more like Disney than Dostoevsky when, as sometimes happens, the two players are standing only a few feet apart.

In these finger-paint pigments, Karamazov’s characters bulge as bright and solid and healthy as a basket of California grapefruit. Lee J. Cobb, as the elder Karamazov, gives the most overripe performance—and probably the best. Yui Brynner is much too mannered and wooden to be Dmitri. Richard Basehart seems uncertain of what Ivan is all about. William Shatner plays Alyosha as a sort of Sunday Schoolboy. About as Russian as Hollywood’s own Mike Romanoff, they all obviously owe less to the Moscow method than to the Southern Califormula.

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