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The smile includes the romantic tragedy he also knows to be an absurdity, and yet he cannot resist spraying it all with an almost cloying odor of Victor Hugo No. 5. But in an instant Ophuls will catch himself up with a comic grimace. There are vignettes of "le hunting,'' of an English youth on the grand tour, of an aged nymph at a ball, that almost break up the show with guffaws. Not to forget some wickedly amusing lines—e.g., "A woman can refuse jewels she hasn't seen," says the count's petite amie, as she hesitates to accept his gift. "But after that, it's heroism."
And there are veins of deeper irony to be mined. The bedtime scene between the society couple—she at her woolgathering, he at his paper, and the beds a shouting mile apart—not only is a pretty parody of all such make-the-point scenes, but actually does make a lot of points about a complex relationship and the kind of society that produced it. Deeper still lies the moment, at the height of tension, when the count, normally a "civilized" man, is so deeply shaken that he tells his wife the truth. "I didn't like your picture of me," he says. "But I tried to look like it so as not to displease you."
Devastating Charm. Boyer as the count is like no Boyer ever seen on the Hollywood screen. Gone are all the mannerisms, the soulful eye-woggling and love-me-please pout. He is the military aristocrat to the last shoe button, going a fair piece down Swann's Way with no illusions—an intelligent, very French, clearly self-knowing performance. As the countess, Darrieux nicely achieves an odd mix of innocence, flirtiness, and neurasthenia, but cannot quite hold her own with the competition.
Nor can even Boyer, in fact, quite hold the stage with De Sica. Although De Sica is 53, Ophuls had the eye to see him as a lover—and a lover of devastating charm he makes. De Sica conveys the sense of a man old enough to know what he really wants of a woman, still young enough to get it, and, most exciting of all, strong enough to say no when he has had enough.
The sum of success in all these parts is a triumph of the whole, and the triumph belongs to Director Ophuls. The hybrid style he has developed, with its exotic fertilizations from a dozen earlier epochs, has at last produced a mature fruit—a sort of artistic pomegranate. The flavor is a shade oversubtle, but most people will be delighted to have tried it.
Valley of the Kings (M-G-M), a kind of shovel opera about archaeologists in Egypt, bears out the well-known Hollywood saying: "You don't have to be good if you're lucky." The picture went into production late in 1953, was completed before Archaeologist Kamal el Malakh hit the headlines with his surprise discovery of the solar boats beside Cheops' pyramid (TIME, June 7). Released now, the film should ride the wave of publicity a fairish distance before it hits box-office bottom.