The Strange Ones (Jean-Pierre Melville; Mayer-Kingsley) are an adolescent brother & sister whose deep affection for each other is colored with inevitable tragedy. Adapted by France's Jean Cocteau from his 1929 novel, Les Enfants Terribles, The Strange Ones is a baroque, grotesque, always fascinating excursion into a dark-bright dream world, set off by a glacial commentary delivered in the author's own dry, precise voice.
Blonde, boyish Elizabeth (Nicole Stephane) and ailing, somnambulistic Paul (Edouard Dermithe) live like "two limbs of the same body," isolated from the outside world in an unreal, fabulously disordered "turtle's shell" of a room in a Montmartre apartment. In this chamber, "balanced on the brink of a myth," they play in utter unselfconsciousness a childish-grown-up sort of game: prancing and pluming themselves, idolizing and tormenting each other, cramming themselves gluttonously with a sticky hodgepodge of sensations.
When their invalid mother dies, Paul and Elizabeth move to a seaside hotel and then to an 18-room town house, where they screen off one corner of a vast, jumbled gallery. But by then the outside world—in the persons of their friends Agatha and Gerard, who have fallen in love with them—has pried open the door to their secret chamber. The two children who refuse to grow up are unable to survive the sudden, chilling glare of reality.
This twilight zone of murky pathological recesses and phantom feelings is, in Jean-Pierre Melville's direction, as effective cinematically as it is poetic. As in Cocteau's 1948 movie, Les Parents Terribles, the camera roves freely and fluently through the disorder of the children's room. There are odd, feverish screen compositions, e.g., the great, grappling close-up in which, as Agatha tells Elizabeth of her love for Paul, only Agatha's forehead is seen on the screen, with Elizabeth's strange, grey face hanging above it. As the Cocteau children, Nicole Stephane with her short, curly hair and Edouard Dermithe with his masklike pallor are as gravely handsome as young Greek deities, as cruel and capricious as little beasts. They are indeed terrible young ones, who resemble each other physically as well as in their temperaments of fire and ice. In the background, a swelling Vivaldi-Bach concerto score shores up the fragmented melodramatics of this brilliantly macabre Cocteau party.
She's Working Her Way Through College (Warner) poses a solemn problem: Is a burlesque queen (Virginia Mayo) with a yen for culture entitled to a college education? The answer is yes, mainly because of the brave battle for academic freedom waged by Theater Arts Professor Ronald Reagan. "Hot Garters Gertie," as the bump & grind artist is known, is saved from expulsion when Professor Reagan threatens to expose Board of Trustees Chairman Roland Winters as a wolf in sheepskin clothing who once gave Gertie a mink coat.