Wild Is the Wind (Hal Wallis; Paramount) makes a reasonably honest, week-end farmer's effort to turn the warm loam of natural life. Director George Cukor, though obviously a city feller, has managed to provide himself, for the occasion, with a conspicuously green thumb. Producer Hal Wallis has provided the movie with Italy's Anna Magnani, an actress as earthy (and sometimes as mysteriously beautiful) as a potato; with Anthony Quinn, an actor so radically natural that not even 20 years of Hollywood has spoiled him; and with a screenplay by Arnold Schulman that veers with the story's gusts of emotion as lightly as a weathercock in the wind.
Schulman tells the tale of a Nevada sheep rancher (Quinn), a rough, good-hearted Italian immigrant whose wife has died, and who goes back to Italy to fetch her sister (Magnani) to bed and board. The new wife soon finds out that he is still in love with the old, that he does not want her to be herself, but only to be "like Rosanna." Impossible. Rosanna was a yes woman; Gioia is one of those passionate natures that take time by the forelock and life by the throat. "You look like a slob!" her husband roars. "Why don' you be like Rosanna?" And Gioia tells him fiercely: "She was her. I'm me."
Things come to a head at a party. Falling down drunk, the husband tries to make up to Gioia by proposing a toast which he begins with a disastrous slip of the tongue: "To my wife Rosanna!" Gioia locks him out of their room. "Go sleep with the dead!" she rages. He takes a trip. Desperate to be loved, and loved for what she is, she gives herself to her husband's adopted son (Anthony Franciosa).
It is evident—from what is easily the strongest moment in the film—that the moviemakers regard a passionate adultery as a minor offense, compared to a loveless marriage. In the latter case, the offense is against nature, and nature is the standard in this picture.
Sayonara (Warner) is a modern version of Madame Butterfly which has gained in social significance but lost its wings—Puccini's music.
The significance is embedded in a passionate plea on behalf of miscegenation. Based on James Michener's bestselling switch on John Luther Long's love story, the picture tells the tale of Major Lloyd Gruver (Marlon Brando), an ace of the Korean war known as "the Air Force's pinup boy," and a Japanese pinup girl named Hana-ogi (Miiko Taka), the star of the Matsubayashi vaudeville troupe.
Brando is supposed to be a Southerner—though his accent sounds as if it was strained through Stanislavsky's mustache. When he first meets Hana-ogi, he believes that "fraternization is a disgrace to the uniform." But he has to admit that she is "a fahn-lookin' woman," and the color line soon becomes as vague in his mind as the meridian of Greenwich. "I will love you, Gruver-san," she murmurs to him one day, "if that is what you desire." That is what he desires, all right, and after much too much Brandoperatic declamation about "what mah reason fuh livin' is," he decides that he also desires to marry her.