Children, Seen & Heard

In British movies, moppets are often nice and polite; in U.S. films, they can be nice and bratty. Current examples:

A Kid for Two Farthings (London Films; Lopert) stars six-year-old Jonathan Ashmore in a brightly colored fairy tale staffed with a prince and princess charming, a wise old man, an enchanted animal and a fearsome ogre. Its flavor is perhaps too sweet: even the ogre lives happily ever after.

Master Ashmore scurries like quicksilver through London's teeming East End, dodging under pushcarts, chasing pigeons, peering into a basement gymnasium, popping up beside adults just as they give voice to their vain hopes for the future. At home, the child listens to fables told by Tailor David Kossoff, who spins a yarn about unicorns (for a unicorn owner, all wishes come true).

The boy finds his unicorn, a baby goat with a single horn, and his first wish is for an engagement ring for statuesque Diana Dors, a bathycolpian blonde who is unbelievably cast as a poor seamstress. Her prince charming (Joe Robinson) is a muscle-bound golden boy who dreams of becoming Mr. Universe, but, instead, must wrestle the ogre (Primo Carnera) to win his bride. Carnera tries hard to be a villain by baring his tusk-filled mouth but only succeeds in resembling an especially genial earth-excavator. Producer Carol (The Fallen Idol) Reed makes his Technicolor slum seem as airy and bright as Cockaigne and his slum child as well-mannered and winning as any princeling.

Lovers & Lollipops (Trans-Lux) stars seven-year-old Cathy Dunn, who has mastered the pouting, fat-cheeked scowl of a child about to assault a stranger with sticky fingers. Her widowed mother (Lori March) is being courted by Gerald O'Loughlin, and their small-scale love affair is played out against the large-scale backdrop of Manhattan. Trailing the child, the lovers wander hand in hand to Central Park, the Museum of Modern Art, Rye Beach. Cathy is thoroughly repellent as she hides out in a parking lot, dawdles through a toy store, and refuses to go to bed and give the grownups some privacy. Produced by Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin, who made 1953's surprise hit The Little Fugitive, Lovers seems to get closer to reality than does Hollywood, but it is actually not any closer to the essential truth about people. The actors are only an excuse for some arty but effective travelogue photography.

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