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The closeups of the tigers burn bright with a sensuous beauty, and all the crowd scenes are well handled. Frequently, though, the Biblical dialogue gets out of whack. Sample: Debra Paget, as a Christian girl, holding up the robe: "Oooo! I didn't know Christ was so tall. Was he as tall as you?" Victor Mature, modestly: "Just about." Mr. Mulct's Holiday (G-B-D International) appears to be a contemporary French attempt to make a silent film in sound. Oddly enough, the product of this paradox is a clever little anachronism, and it won a grand prize at the film festival in Cannes last year.
Holiday at its best is a bloodless brother to the old Harry Langdon comedies: a firecracker string of prop gags and pratfalls that takes 85 minutes to sputter itself out. Dialogue is so infrequent that it hardly matters that much of it is in French. The sound track carries little but the punctuation marks—burps, dings, splats, oogahs—for the strictly visual language in which the silly story is told.
Mr. Hulot, played by Jacques Tati, a 6 ft. 4 in. French comic who also coauthored, directed and produced the picture, is a sort of self-winding cuckoo who goes for his vacation to a small beach in Brittany. The horrors of modern travel are hilariously catalogued in a few sharp shots: train travelers hustling, while the loudspeaker blares unintelligibly, from one wrong platform to another; umbrellas locking as two people rush for buses in opposite directions; a bus driver seizing the steering wheel of his crowded vehicle, only to find the head of a small boy sticking up through the spokes.
At the beach Mr. Hulot and his friends soon encounter such traditional terrors as the melted sneakers left in the closet by the previous tenant, the small boy who burns holes in things with a magnifying glass, the pingpong fiend who keeps crawling apologetically under the bridge table to retrieve his ball, the retired colonel who organizes a picnic like a regimental maneuver. By the end of the visit everybody is thoroughly exhausted and goes home to recuperate.
The beauty of Mr. Hulot's Holiday is its elegant sparsity. At the camera, Jacques Mercanton and Jean Mouselle show some of Chaplin's gift for getting the moviegoer exactly where he can see the most in the least time. The cutting from shot to shot is quick as a wink, but the frames are so large and full of sweet sea air that the audience is left with a winning sense of being on vacation despite all the scurry.
The acting, though sharply restricted to vignettes and the mechanics of comic mishap, is so precise as to speak eloquently for Jacques Tati's direction. Unhappily, his own portrayal, often too stilted, is the least amusing of all. Still, Holiday is one of the pleasantest nothings to come out of France since Rene Clair made Le Million, and suggests that a new movie talent has leaped the language barrier.