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Traffic Jams. Experts have tried to isolate something of the special Novak quality. Says Director Otto (The Man with the Golden Arm) Preminger: "Novak is the way every American girl would like to look, and every man would like to have a girl like that. She is not too sophisticated. She gives you a feeling of compassion." Says Cameraman James Wong Howe, who shot Picnic: "What makes her interesting is the combination of her classical beauty with a sensual, lush quality." Says Director George (The Eddy Duchin Story) Sidney: "She has the fa cade and the equipment of a bitch in the long shot. Yet when you look in Kim's eyes in a closeup, she's like a baby. There is a fire with the sweetness, a bitchery with the virtue, all in one package."
However it works, her magnetism draws 3,500 fan letters a week and exerts its tug freely across international borders. At last year's Cannes Film Festival (where she danced with Rita Hayworth's ex-husband, Aly Khan), the international press corps virtually ignored other stars in a tumbling pursuit of the blonde American girl who had then appeared in Europe in only two movies (Pushover, Phffft!). Last week, vacationing in the frequent company of an attentive, wealthy Italian businessman, Mario Bandini, 33, Kim created traffic jams on the Roman stamping ground of Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida.
Heights of Adequacy. Next week Kim Novak will mark a new milestone: the U.S. release of Jeanne Eagels, the first movie designed as her personal vehicle and thoroughly dominated by the character she plays. Until now, she has been shrewdly cast in roles that seemed remarkably varied yet actually made only modest demands on her modest resources. She has played a dizzy platinum blonde (Phffft!), a red-tressed, small-town belle (Picnic), a slum-dwelling B-girl (The Man with the Golden Arm), a golden-haired Manhattan society beauty of the '205 (The Eddy Duchin Story). In each picture, the major acting burden fell on others, while Newcomer Novak managed to scale the heights of.adequacy. Jeanne Eagels casts her in the first part that is just beyond her grasp—that of an actress. And not just any actress, but the brilliant, tempestuous Broadway deity of the teens and '20s, who ran for four years as Sadie Thompson in Rain, lived with tigerish passion, and died at 35 in a gutterdam-merung of hooch and heroin.
Kim attacks the role gamely. To prepare for it, she read everything she could find on Jeanne Eagels. "The first thing I read said she was irrational and sensitive and all the things I sort of am, and how she used to eat pickles in school like me." Kim was instantly attracted. She plastered her dressing room with pictures of the star (whom she actually resembles), rehearsed while a phonograph played mood music of the '203. For sad scenes, an accordionist played Poor Butterfly. But in the picture, Kim proves more kitten than tigress; her tempests rattle not even a teacup. Happily for her admirers, this indifferently fictionalized cinememoir reveals more of Kim than ever before; shedding for a midnight dip with her lover (Jeff Chandler), or wiggling proficiently through a hootchy-kootchy dance in the carnival he runs, she shows that her extraordinary complexion is just as good all over. No matter how art may suffer, all should work out nicely at the box office.