Sex & the Censor

For weeks, moviegoers in Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles have been crowding to see La Ronde, a French film that took prizes in three European film festivals. Like moviegoers in London, where the picture is flourishing in its sixth month, they seem to like what they see: an audacious, worldly-wise comedy of sex. In both U.S. cities, the film drew cheers from the critics--and not a murmur of protest from any guardian of the public morals. But last week wicked old New York, which almost always gets first crack at a foreign movie, had still not seen La Ronde, and could not, by bureaucratic decree. The state censors, who burned their fingers this year on Roberto Rossellini's The Miracle (TIME, Jan. 8), refused to pass La Ronde on the ground that it would tend to corrupt the morals of its audiences.

Whether or not it can corrupt anyone's morals, La Ronde (Commercial Pictures) is clearly suitable for grownups and almost as certain to delight them. Based on Arthur Schnitzler's Reigen, it takes an intimate, cynical view of the mating instinct at play in a Vienna that was turning the century without a break in its giddy stride. Director Max (Letter to an Unknown Woman) Ophuls has lovingly put together this wry ode to love, and brightened it with a galaxy of Continental stars: Anton Walbrook, Danielle Darrieux, Fernand Gravet, Simone Simon, Gerard Philipe, Simone Signoret, Isa Miranda,

Jean-Louis Barrault, Odette Joyeux.

The "round" of the title is a roundelay of love in ten episodes; after each amorous intrigue, one of the lovers moves, in the next episode, into the arms of a new partner, who flits in turn to another lover until the ironic game comes full circle. Through the cycle runs a delightful Oscar Straus waltz, signaling each consummation, helping to set a gauzily Viennese mood, and accompanying a refrain sung and spoken by Narrator Walbrook. The narrator spins a symbolic merry-go-round and manages the characters like a master puppeteer, pops up in each episode as a waiter, doorman or passerby and once, prophetically, with shears in one hand and film in the other, as the censor.

The film's characters run the social gamut from the count to the streetwalker, but stick to the same single track. The episodes vary in length, mood and quality. The longest and best, strung together midway in the film, shine with a brilliance that the rest of the movie cannot match. These catch the essence of three classic situations: the willing maid (Simone Simon) and the nervously eager master (Daniel Gelin); the master and the other man's wife (Danielle Darrieux) who wants to be coaxed into infidelity; the faithless wife inciting and lulling the suspicion of her sanctimonious husband (Fernand Gravet).

But La Ronde is all of a piece, as any round should be, setting up a mocking harmony of desire and disillusion, vanity, pleasure and deceit. It is never prurient, smirking or pornographic. For all the intimacy of its nuances, the film's approach is dryly detached and completely charming; it spoofs sex rather than exploits it, much as Britain's satiric Kind Hearts and Coronets makes sport of murder.

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