Aida (Sol Hurok; I.F.E.). Italian film makers have released eight filmed operas to U.S. art houses in the past seven years. Some of them translated into fairly acceptable films. Aida, with its vivid Ferraniacolor, its monumental settings of ancient Memphis, its popular and dramatic music, its handsome acting cast and its standout (mostly invisible) singing cast, aims at being the grandest assault yet on U.S. eyes and ears.
But in Aida, the eyes have it. Lest any of the plot be lost between the music and the Italian language, a discreet narrator explains each scene before it starts. Aida (Sophia Loren) is a slant-eyed, dusky-skinned, full-lipped Ethiopian slave girl in the Egyptian court. She and the stone-faced princess (Lois Maxwell) are in love with a weak-mouthed warrior named Radames (Luciano della Marra). Radames is sent off to trounce the Ethiopians and is rewarded, all against his will, with the hand of the princess. Torn between love and guilt, he slips Aida a top-secret battle plan. He is nabbed and both are left to die in the well-lit dungeons beneath the city while dancing girls posture on the floor above.
Composer Giuseppe Verdi, who discovered Egypt some 80 years ahead of Hollywood, set the yarn to some of the finest music ever to come out of Italy. Director Clemente Fracassi has put it in the mouths of Top Singers Renata Tebaldi, Ebe Stignani and Giuseppe Campora (with supporting singers from La Scala and the Rome Opera). He has had his visible actors synchronize their lips and slow-motion movements with the music. Unfortunately, his $3,000,000 budget apparently made no allowances for up-to-date recording equipment. Too often Aida rasps and burbles as though it were being played on a windup phonograph with a rusty needle—and another low blow is dealt to grand opera.
Track of the Cat (Wayne-Fellows; Warner). In his novel about a catamount chase, Walter Van Tilburg Clark suggested that the evil his characters do stalks after them in the form of a black panther. On the screen, an actor comes right out and mutters hollowly that the panther "is the evil in everybody."
On that A-B-C symbolic level, when the panther eats up some Good Instincts (cows), a sort of back-country Cain (Robert Mitchum) and his Abel-type brother (William Hopper) set forth to slay the beast. Abel dies beneath the Tree of Life and Cain also turns up his toes. But a third brother (Tab Hunter) puts a bullet in the panther, and just at that instant the sun breaks through a cloud, transfiguring him into something painfully like the Better Life.
All this is doled out as solemnly as a lantern-slide lecture in German philosophy, with the actors uneasily unsure whether they are really U.S. dirt farmers, by cracky, or Leibnitzian particles in a transcendental ether. The color is excellent, though it is not clear why color is needed; the exterior shots are mostly of snowscapes marked with black exclamations of pine, and the interiors are in starkest black and white (Good v. Evil). To suggest, perhaps, the eternal travail of these opposites, the picture has been made as eternal as possible (102 minutes). When at last the moviegoer dares hope it will end, one of the characters looks him square in the eye and announces: "There's a grave to dig yet."