Imports

Jour de Fete (Fred Orain; Mayer-Kingsley) transplants some Mack Sennett pratfalls to the French provinces. The center of this slapstick is Franc,ois (Jacques Tati), a sad-faced, gangling, rural postman who looks like a cross between General Charles de Gaulle and oldtime silent Comic Charles Chase. On the annual fair day (jour de fete), Franc,ois sees a movie about high-speed American postal methods and develops a mania for movement.

Instead of dawdling at bistros and helping with the haying, Francois takes on a little wine and goes "all American." Neither snow, nor rain, nor the vicissitudes thrown in his path by the scenarists stay him from his jet-propelled rounds. Astride his ramshackle bike, leather case flying in the breeze, he whizzes past bicycle road racers and delivers mail down wells, on farmers' pitchforks and in threshing machines--when he is not tangling with wasps, pigs and flagpoles. The wine finally wears off, the fair departs and village and postman go back to a more tranquil tempo. "News," says one of the inhabitants of sleepy Sainte-Severe-sur-Indre philosophically, "is so bad nowadays we certainly can wait a few extra minutes for the letters."

This tenuous little spoof-on-a-bicycle is no weightier than a postcard, and its contents are no more momentous. But in the sprightly pantomiming of Actor Tati (who also directed and co-authored the screenplay), the picture occasionally seems to be arriving by special delivery.

The Young and the Damned (Oscar Dancigers; Mayer-Kingsley) are a gang of savage slum children running wild on the outskirts of Mexico City, where they steal, beat up a blind beggar, attack a legless man and commit murder. Filmed in Mexico as Los Olvidados (The Forgotten Ones), the picture was directed by Spam's onetime surrealist Moviemaker Luis Bunuel and photographed by Mexico's famed Cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa. The Young and the Damned is in the raw, realistic tradition of such classic juvenile-delinquency movies as the Russian Road to Life, the American Wild Boys of the Road and the Italian Shoe Shine. In some respects it is the most powerful and ruthless of the lot.

With a keen camera, Director Bunuel examines the piles of rubble, squalid hovels and garbage heaps where people scrounge for food like animals. The acting, by a cast that is largely amateur, is as nakedly authentic as the settings, particularly in the performance of Roberto Cobo as Jaibo, the frighteningly cruel leader of the gang, and Miguel Inclan as the old blind beggar who intones a litany of hate for the boys, "One less, one less," as Jaibo is shot down by the police.

The movie does not offer any solution to the problem it poses beyond leaving it to "the progressive forces of our time." Says Director Bunuel: "There is nothing imagined in this film. It is all merely true." But, in its unrelieved gloom and its total sociological despair, The Young and the Damned sometimes seems as one-dimensional and as far short of the truth as a lurid propaganda poster. Typical sequence: the body of a murdered boy being carted on muleback to a public garbage dump while his mother unknowingly passes by.

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