Bonjour Tristesse (Preminger; Columbia). The thoughts of youth, in the case of 18-year-old French Novelist Franchise Sagan, were brief, decadent and commercial. Her first novel (TIME, Feb. 14, 1955) sold more than 600,000 copies in France and more than 1,625,000 in the U.S. At first the critics were amazed at the book's "maturity," but later many decided that the maturity was mostly just adultery. In this picture the adultery has been tastefully toned down. What is left is an old-fashioned story about incest.
The affair between father (David Niven) and daughter (Jean Seberg), which takes place mostly on the French Riviera, is not physical. Incest, as this story sees it, is emotional infantilism—the fear of life, the compulsion to security, the marriage with death. The marriage is consummated, not with a gesture of creation but with an act of destruction. The daughter murders her father's mistress (Deborah Kerr). Technically, the death is either a suicide or an accident, but if the method is euphemistic the meaning is clear. Father and daughter drift off on an aimless round of inconsequential pleasures.
It is a repulsive tale, but somehow repulsively alluring, though not in the same way the book was. Sagan's sensuous sentences suggested the presence of horror by wreathing softly about it; the camera pries into its morbid subject like a coroner. And the meanings that the novelist saw through her looking glass, darkly, Director Otto Preminger sees face to face in staring Mediterranean sunlight. He loses the French style but gains some common substance.
Director Preminger has done well with his actors, too. David Niven is remarkable as the sort of rake that accumulates his life in his face, like a pile of dead leaves. Deborah Kerr provides one transcendent scene in which, as she overhears her man with another woman, her prim, pretty English face breaks up like a cooky in the fingers of a child. And Jean Seberg, rebounding from her disastrous debut as Joan of Arc (TIME, July 1), blooms with just the right suggestion of unhealthy freshness, a cemetery flower.
Most of the picture's defects are inherited from the author—the schoolgirl longueurs on life, the Rimbaudelairean sentimentality about evil, the fashionable despairs with the Paris labels on them. But then the author has provided the vital thing in the picture too: a story that seizes the imagination and insists on being read not only as a story but as a symptom of one of the more exotic diseases of leisure.
Legend of the Lost (Batjac; United Artists) is filled with authentic Technicolor views of Libya, and packed with authentic Hollywood hokum. The movie stars Rossano Brazzi as a no-good do-gooder, Sophia Loren as a bad girl from Timbuktu, and John Wayne as the man who discovers something good about her.