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The curious thing is that although this moving picture is schizoid, most of its faces are worth attention. The problems —Preston's apart—are convincingly presented, and in general the solutions are not pat. Actress McGuire plays a limited part well, and Shirley Knight is outstandingly effective as the tormented daughter.
Between shouting matches. Actor Preston gaily galumphs through some fine, if slightly incongruous, comedy scenes. Director Delbert Mann handles these scenes well, and only occasionally does he allow situations to descend to the level that is fondly known in the women's fiction trade as "heartwarming."
All the Fine Young Cannibals (Avon; M-S-M) proves once again that while inspiration may falter, color cameras never get tired. The anthropophagi of the title are four unpleasant young folks from Texas (Robert Wagner, Natalie Wood, George Hamilton and Susan Kohner). Poor Boy Wagner loves Poor Girl Wood —carelessly, as it turns out. Spurning his offer of honorable wedlock, she boards an eastbound train, meets suave Yaleman Hamilton and, smelling riches, lets herself be plied with strong drink from his portable pigskin bar. He has her way with her, so to speak. Later, learning that Natalie is pregnant and not suspecting that he is not the father, Hamilton marries the girl and rents a mansion in New Haven that is conveniently near to classes.
Actress Kohner is a young woman with excellent teeth who plays Hamilton's sister. Her lines run to such glass-crackers as "ah had to convince Mother that ah would commit man very own suicide if ah didn't have man way." Eventually she tries suicide her very own way, and the script implies that her parents are largely to blame. In fact, the film is very severe with parents; all the brats have culpable elders.
Soon the scene shifts from the sinful luxury of the Ivy League to the saloons of New York. Actor Wagner, the Texan left behind, has become a huge success as, of all things, a trumpet player. To spite Natalie, he marries Susan, which seems to be carrying spite too far. For a while it looks as if the four young marrieds will not live happily ever after, but the only character who comes to a bad end is Singer Pearl Bailey. She is supposed to be a blues singer dying of unrequited love, but actually her malady looks more like embarrassment.
Day of the Painter (Litfle Movies), an extremely funny 15-minute film, may be taken as a solemn leg-pull of the recent vogue for dribble-and-splotch painters, those athletic canvas-coverers whose style owes less to Van Gogh's brush technique than to Stan Laurel's custard pie stance. Or it may be taken as an explicit set of instructions for getting rich.
The film, a first-time effort by three ex-admen, begins with a loving shot of wharfs, fishing shacks and the sounding sea—the sort of vista once sketched avidly by artists and now appreciated chiefly by retired couples who tour Cape Cod in late September. The artist is a burly fellow (Ezra Reuben Baker), recognizably aesthetic in paint-smeared dungarees, scurrilous red sweater and combat boots. He trundles a cart filled with paint buckets along a dock, then throws an enormous sheet of wallboard down on a mud flat ten feet below.