New Picture

Prince of Foxes (20th Century-Fox] is probably Hollywood's most ambitious attempt to exploit actual locations. To recreate the look of Renaissance Italy, veteran Director Henry King & company spent six months and $4,500,000 (about half of it in the studio's frozen Italian lire). They fanned out to 14 Italian cities and towns and to the tiny mountain republic of San Marino, which 20th Century-Fox rented, complete with population, at $40 a day. No expense or trouble was spared; to help create a 15th Century view of the domes and canals of Venice, the Italians gladly detoured motorboats and uprooted telephone poles.

Visually, it was all worthwhile. Beautifully photographed in black & white, the film is encrusted with atmosphere: tapestried, frescoed splendor of vaulted palaces and chapels, lush, brocaded period costumes, sweating dungeons and stately formal gardens, misty canals, soaring mountain fortresses and the cloud-hung, peak-strewn landscapes of central Italy.

Unfortunately, the actors keep getting into the foreground, brandishing passports from Hollywood and posturing through a sprawling script based on the bestselling drugstore novel of Borgia intrigue by Samuel (Captain from Castile) Shella-barger (see BOOKS). The very authenticity of the surroundings helps to betray the story and characters as strictly from Graustark. And even Graustark is betrayed: moviegoers willing to take swashbuckling romance on its own easygoing terms are likely to chafe at the film's portentous pace and the political airs it puts on.

The hero of Prince of Foxes is Andrea Orsini (Tyrone Power), who is not only a talented diplomat, but also a swordsman, painter, great lover, ordnance expert, politician and military strategist. Into the bargain, he is a peasant-born rogue posing as a noble cutthroat in the service of ruthless Cesare Borgia (Orson Welles). While carving out a promising career in treachery, Orsini comes heroically to his senses on a tough mission: to conquer an almost impregnable little duchy by seducing the duchess (Wanda Hendrix) and assassinating the duke (Felix Aylmer).

By conditioned reflex, experienced moviegoers may accept Tyrone Power as a dashing example of Renaissance Man. But Wanda Hendrix, ludicrously miscast as an Italian noblewoman, looks like a bobby-soxer lost in an art museum. As her guardian-husband, Aylmer is still playing Polonius with all the sententiousness and none of the wit. Welles, in his own freehand style, out-borgias Borgia. Even as capable an actor as Everett Sloane plays a scoundrel to excess.

Without all the conspiring characters, Prince of Foxes could be a first-rate travelogue enlivened by some stormy, well-directed battle scenes. As it is, the picture plainly indicates that the best films to come out of Italy are still being made by the Italians.

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