The New Pictures

Cyrano de Bergerac (Stanley Kramer; United Artists) is Hollywood's first attempt to film Edmond Rostand's classic verse comedy about the monstrous-nosed swordsman-poet who wooed his adored Roxane for another man. If it is not all that admirers of the play might wish, it is more than most of them might dare to expect. Producer Stanley (The Men) Kramer keeps faith with the unabashedly romantic spirit of the original, and Actor Jose Ferrer, who gave Broadway its most recent (1946) production of the play, is the very embodiment of Rostand's self-sacrificing, self-dramatizing hero.

In most ways, the story has been intelligently remolded for the screen. Working from the Brian Hooker translation, Scripter Carl Foreman has tightened the play's continuity--a good idea in any Cyrano production--without muffling its lyricism or wit. By dramatizing Rostand's offstage action and breaking each scene into bits small enough for the camera to digest, he has given the picture unusual mobility for an adaptation from the stage. Among the additions: a blade-by-blade filming of Cyrano's duel with the cutthroats.

Purists will probably carp at some changes, e.g., at least two of the play's characters have disappeared, leaving their crucial lines to be read by others. But ironically, the picture's weakness lies in its fidelity to Rostand's design rather than in the liberties it takes with his text. Flamboyantly theatrical, the play is given to such bald devices as the balcony scene in which Cyrano gulls Roxane into taking his voice for Christian's. Such broad strokes of old-fashioned footlight hokum seem glaringly magnified by the realistic eye of Director Michael Gordon's camera. The hard scrutiny of the lens also shows less mercy !han the stage for Cyrano's soft core of unblushing sentiment, unstinted gallantry, unending heroics. In this harsh light, middle-aged moviegoers who loved Cyrano in their youth may feel that they are looking at an early sweetheart who has aged 30 years.

Audiences, traditionally willing to meet this impossibly romantic classic half way, may have to go a bit further this time. Their surest reward will be a fine performance by Actor Ferrer, who gets uniformly good support from Mala Powers, a pretty Roxane. William Prince does well as the tongue-tied Christian, and Ralph Clanton as the haughty Comte de Guiche. Ferrer gives his role its full measure of lovelorn fervor, comic flair and wry pathos. Wearing the white plume with grand-mannered dash and strut, he also displays the kind of swordsmanship that ought to charm the popcorn set into listening to the poetry.

> Mad Wednesday (RKO Radio], starring Harold Lloyd, one of the great comedians of silent pictures, is a curious mixture of high comic invention and low humor. Filmed five years ago by Preston (The Miracle of Morgan's Creek) Sturges under the title The Sin of Harold Diddle-bock, it contains a fuzzy exposition of Writer-Director Sturges' economic philosophy ("This is a picture against security. It shows that trouble sharpens the wit and security dulls it"). As currently released by RKO's Howard Hughes, who ended a brief partnership with Sturges in 1946, Mad Wednesday has suffered some cutting and at least one lamentable addition, e.g., a talking cab horse.

The movie opens with the final reel from Harold Lloyd's 1923 film The Freshman, a slapstick and very funny sequence showing how Waterboy Lloyd made a last-minute touchdown for his alma mater. An elated alumnus (Raymond Walburn) promises the young hero a job but has some difficulty remembering who he is when Lloyd, armed with mottoes and boundless enthusiasm, reports for work. Finally taken on as a bookkeeper, Lloyd is seen 22 years later, still grinding away at the same job. After being fired in a bitterly comic scene with his employer's son (also played by Walburn), the cowed bookkeeper has another brief moment of glory: he goes on a two-day bender, wins $30,000 on the races and winds up the possessor of a hangover, a circus, a hansom cab and a wife (Frances Ramsden), the seventh and youngest of a succession of sisters he has loved in vain.

Some of the jokes in Mad Wednesday are good, but most of them are dragged on too long. Lloyd has a classic scene with Jimmy Conlin and a lion, all three teetering on the roof edge of a skyscraper. Lionel Stander, Franklin Pangborn and Arline Judge get a Marx Brothers quality into a barbershop scene, and the late Edgar Kennedy works manfully as a bartender who creates a super-cocktail in honor of Lloyd's first drink.

King Solomon's Mines (MGM) offers the year's most impressive claim to the word colossal. It has Technicolored jungles, deserts, mountains and African veldt, 8,000 native tribesmen and 6,000 wild animals, supported by Deborah Kerr and Stewart Granger. To film the picture, an intrepid Hollywood troupe sweated out five months on Africa's biggest safari, traveled 25,000 miles by plane, boat, truck, ox-drawn wagon, horse and foot. All the ingredients of the picture's story, based on the H. Rider Haggard novel of 1885, have been ridden haggard by lesser jungle epics through the years. But out of 200,000 feet of exposed film (plus some additional footage reshot in darkest New Mexico), Producer Sam Zimbalist has put together the equivalent of a whopping good travelogue.

The plot has to do with a safari engaged y wealthy Englishwoman Kerr and her brother (Richard Carlson* ) to track down her husband, who has vanished into unexplored territory in search of the legendary King Solomon's mines. In the midst of hardships and hairbreadth escapes, the hostility between Deborah and White Hunter Granger ripens into true love.

Directors Compton Bennett and Andrew Marton have bolstered this lean framework with all the animals, natural hazards and tribal customs that they and their technicians could coax out of the harsh, sometimes placid beauty of varied African landscapes. A sequence that ranks as one of the most eye-bulging sights ever caught on film: accompanied by a ground-shaking roar, thousands of animals-zebras, gazelles, impalas, bushbucks, lions, giraffes--stampede into and around the camera. Of the six cameras that Director Marton set up to film the scene, one was pounded into the ground while Cinematographer Gene Polito had to dive to safety behind a barricade.

Another arresting sight: a primitive duel, staged for the story's climax, between contenders for the rule of the seven-foot-tall Watusi of Ruanda-Urundi, a remarkably aristocratic tribe with features that seem to come straight from the ancient Pharaohs. The Watusi's longtime slaves, the Buhutus, also help Africa steal the show from Hollywood. Before the duel is fought, they throw themselves into a long, exotically graceful dance that far outstrips any choreography ever put into one of MGM's musicals. For moviegoers who don't have much hope of making a visit to Africa this year, King Solomon's Mines is the next best thing.

* Who sold a three-installment article to Collier's detailing the adventures of the moviemaking safari.

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