(2 of 2)
The movie, like the twice-revived, widely toured Broadway version of 1947, is the Grand-Guignol story of a cruel, shabby fraud of a clairvoyant (Marie Powers) who comes to believe in the supernatural herself. In her conscience-stricken fear of the unknown, she unwittingly kills her mute assistant (Leo Coleman).
As on the stage, The Medium is played with uncommon credibility for opera, and is well sung by Contralto Powers, young (15) Soprano Anna Maria Alberghetti as her daughter-accomplice, and Donald Morgan, Belva Kibler and Beverly Dame as the all-too-willing victims of her chicanery. Settings and photography hold the film in just the right macabre mood.
Yet even Menotti's flexible use of the camera cannot overcome a major handicap: in scene after scene, the movie makes its dramatic point, then marks time until the singing catches up with the story. Partly to liberate the action from the opera's single indoor set, partly to stretch the work to feature length, Menotti adds some new material, but his story is too simple and its mood too intense to be sustained effectively beyond the time he allotted for it on the stage. The film also suffers when its words become unintelligible in some of the singers' trilling upper range.
The Medium is a good try, promising enough to nominate Director Menotti and Associate Director Alexander Hammid as the men most likely to succeed in future efforts for a successful merger of opera and the screen. They might have better luck if Menotti wrote an opera directly for the movies instead of trying, however ingeniously, to work at second hand.
Hotel Sahara (J. Arthur Rank), the tale of an African desert oasis successively invaded by Italians, British, Nazis and Free French, adds a pleasantly nonbelligerent footnote to World War II. As a
Levantine hotel-owner, not mad at anybody, Peter Ustinov is kept busy running up the appropriate flags and protecting his romantic interest in Yvonne de Carlo. The embattled armies are amiably caricatured, with top honors going to David Tomlinson, as an earnest but fumbling Briton; Guido Lorraine, as a guitar-strumming Italian officer; and Albert Lieven, who brings an effective blend of beery sentiment and deadly efficiency to his portrait of an Afrika Korps lieutenant. Yvonne de Carlo displays a surprising comedy touch as she cheers up the various warriors by appearing, in turn, as a flashing signorina, a tweedy English girl, a no-nonsense fraulein in braids, and a racy cocotte.
Jim Thorpe—All American (Warner) deals with that remote period in U.S. history when a mere hint of commercialism could cost an athlete his amateur standing. As the great Indian champion, Burt Lancaster is muscularly convincing, both in his gridiron triumphs at Carlisle and his 1912 Olympic victories in Sweden. But after the hero is stripped of his trophies, because he has played a summer of semi-pro baseball, the film loses headway and seems unable to decide whether Thorpe was unstable by nature or embittered by circumstances.