The New Pictures

On the Riviera (20th Century-Fox) is that rare Hollywood accomplishment, a cinemusical whose songs, dances and laughs sparkle as brightly as its Technicolor. Set among the lavish pleasures--scenic and feminine--of the French Riviera, the movie serves a fat double helping of Danny Kaye, playing both a brash U.S. entertainer and a debonair French hero whom women cannot resist.

Kaye, who is mimic, comic, dancer and singer, seems to have too many talents to play just one part per movie (other films in which he had multiple identities: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Wonder Man). In Riviera, he is a delight in all his roles. As the French ladykiller, he plays straight with just the right elegant swagger. As the American, he clowns and clogs through impersonations of Maurice Chevalier, Carmen Miranda, a kilted Scot, a puppet, a Spanish dancer and, of course, the fashionable Frenchman.

Kaye's performance and a slick script get new humor out of a farce formula that was old when Plautus (254-184 B.C.) was young: the identities of the impersonator and the impersonated become snarled up until neither the Frenchman's wife (Gene Tierney) nor the American's girl friend (Corinne Calvet) are quite sure which is which. The confusion leaves wife Tierney frantically trying to figure out whether she has been faithful to her husband, sends the dialogue into neatly charted pyramids of double-entendre.

The movie reinforces Kaye with four clever, bouncy songs by his wife Sylvia Fine, good-looking girls in fetching costumes, and skilled dancers in sensuous routines (by Choreographer Jack Cole). Together, under Walter Lang's smooth direction, they make On the Riviera the best cinemusical since 1949's On the Town.

Valentino (Edward Small; Columbia), which trades on the name and fame of Rudolph Valentino, tries to look like the late great screen lover's biography, while admitting that except for him "the characters and events portrayed are fictional."

Though played in deadly earnest, Valentino is fun--in the sense that watching the jerky charades of early movies is fun. Its dialogue sounds as hackneyed as silent subtitles read aloud. Its simple-minded love story, which begs for trilling piano accompaniment, seems too naive for Valentino to have enacted even on the screen of the '20s. Its Technicolored Valentino (Anthony Dexter), trysting with the actress wife (Eleanor Parker) of his director (Richard Carlson), pours out his mockpassionate speeches in a thin stream of Midwestern nasality.

Actor Dexter--who in his native Talmadge, Neb. answers to the name of Walter Fleischmann--got the role after 1,784 candidates had been interviewed and 493 tested. In training for three years, he smooches, smirks, tangoes, goes through the motions of re-enacting scenes from such Valentino favorites as The Sheik and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. He succeeds in looking like Valentino when the camera angle is right; most of the time, he looks like a jowly young man caught in a hopeless hoax.

Valentino's Producer Edward Small spent 13 years getting his movie ready. The project survived 18 versions of the script by some 40 writers, the death of Small's first "discovery" for the title role, the threat that two other producers might rush a Valentino movie.

Last week Producer Small was in for more grief. A libel action was planned by Silent Star Alice Terry, who, like the movie's heroine, played opposite Valentino in a film directed by her husband, the late Rex Ingram. Another suit was announced by Valentino's family--his brother, sister and nephew--who want redress for invasion of privacy and unauthorized use of the Valentino name.

I Was a Communist for the FBI (Warner) bucks a longtime box-office jinx. Except for 1939's deft Ninotchka, which turned laughter loose on Communism, none of Hollywood's anti-Communist movies (e.g., The Red Menace, The Iron Curtain, The Red Danube) has fared well with the customers. The Warner Brothers, who landed in the black with 1939's Confessions of a Nazi Spy, now try to turn the same trick against the Reds.

Like Confessions, the new movie wears documentary trimmings. Based on the true story of Pittsburgh's Matt Cvetic, who served the FBI for nine years as an undercover agent in the Communist Party, the picture uses Communist Big Shot Gerhardt Eisler (played by Konstantin Shayne) as one of its characters, bolsters its footage with newsreel shots of the uproar and street brawls the Reds organized during 1949's Manhattan trial of eleven U.S. Communist leaders. The personal torment of the picture's hero (Frank Lovejoy), suffering the bitter contempt of his anti-Communist son and brothers without being able to let them in on his masquerade, gives the picture a core of human appeal.

Nevertheless, I Was a Communist falls into a crude pattern, both as melodrama and propaganda. Its exposition of the Communist conspiracy--how the party does Moscow's work in U.S. labor unions, industrial plants, schools, minority groups --is as oversimplified, mechanical and unconvincing as the anti-capitalist preachments of left-wing Broadway plays in the '30s. For the benefit of the audience, the movie's Communists are forever reciting to each other, as if for the first time, the ABC's of party tactics. The picture represents Communists as simple gangsters, cynically out for a fast buck and the ultimate spoils of power. Real-life Communists are not so simple. They are after the spoils of power all right, and have been known to welcome a fast buck, but their cynical opportunism is rooted in a warped but zealous idealism, which makes them more formidable foes--and better material for dramatic treatment.

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