The New Pictures

The King and I (20th Century-Fox) has already completed one cycle (from Margaret Landon's bestselling 1944 novel, Anna and the King of Siam, to the 1946 movie, starring Rex Harrison and Irene Dunne) and is now busily completing another (from Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1951 Broadway musical to the current film).

This fourth version of the dependable plot has no surprises. Deborah Kerr, who gets some dubbed-in help on the vocals from Marni Nixon, is both starchy and strong-minded as the British widow brought to Bangkok in the 1860s to teach English and the scientific method to the king's innumerable children. Yul Brynner, in a bare skull and bare feet, plays the Oriental potentate with the same mannered ferocity that he displayed on Broadway during the 1,246 performances of the play's run. About all that Hollywood has added are the production values of CinemaScope 55 and De Luxe color. Except for a few obviously toy boats in the opening shot, each scene appears built to a supercolossal scale, and the film's small passions are played out amid fountained gardens, marble audience halls, Lucullan bedrooms and latticed chambers.

The biggest and best production number is the famed ballet representing a Siamese version of Uncle Tom's Cabin, choreographed by Jerome Robbins, and enchantingly danced by Yuriko and Marion Jim. The King and I moves along satisfactorily from spectacle to spectacle until the conclusion, when its message (democracy is good; slavery is bad) gets a truly pedestrian delivery at Yul Brynner's deathbed. But the jokes are pleasant, the children cute, and the songs, though familiar, have the springtime bounciness that mark Rodgers and Hammerstein's work.

Rififi (UMPO) contains a 30-minute stretch of wordless moviemaking that is one of the most engrossing sequences since the invention of talking pictures. A band of four international thieves plans the burglary of a Parisian jewelry store. They carefully case the shop, study the routine of the night watchman and other inhabitants of the block, buy an identical burglary alarm and painstakingly devise the best means of silencing it.

Not a word is spoken once the robbery is under way. Moving into an apartment above the store, they bind and gag the concierge and his wife, roll back the living-room rug and begin cutting through the concrete floor. When the hole is the width of a man's wrist, an umbrella is lowered through it and opened to catch the fragments of plaster as the gap is widened. Once in the store, the alarm is swiftly disconnected, the safe opened with an electric drill, and the loot removed. The entire operation simulates major surgery: there is the same mute reaching for instruments, the same intensity of purpose, the same growing strain as the operation approaches completion.

But once the burglary is over, Director-Writer Jules (The Naked City) Dassin's imagination fails him. The remainder of the film, with its routine kidnaping, love interest and gang war, seems to have been made by a sadly inferior second team. Jean Servais is coolly efficient as the criminal mastermind, and Carl Mohner and Robert Manuel play his talented assistants. Director Writer Dassin is on screen, too, as an imported Italian safecracker who brings a Latin flourish to his work. Perhaps Dassin spread himself too thin in the picture, but he gathers enough honors in his memorable silent sequence to satisfy most writers, directors and actors for a lifetime of work.

The Wild Oat (Carroll Pictures) is a baby boy, sown by a French soldier and reaped by a village belle of Provence. This wild oat is somewhat distinguished from the others in France's ever-normal granary by Fernandel, France's top comedian, playing the illegitimate tyke's paternal grandpa. As the headstrong village baker, Fernandel is volubly insistent that his son would never do such a thing, refuses to recognize the infant as a descendant.

The hamlet is plunged into civic war over the question of who's lying--Fernandel, who wasn't there and swears that his son wasn't either, v. the unwed mother, who was there and moans that Fernandel's son was, too. Fernandel won't sell bread to his friends turned foes, and the scenes swarm relentlessly, with so many Proven-gal provincials running around like so many Provencal provincials with their bread cut off. The effect might be funnier if time and France's postwar moviemakers had not made stereotypes of them all--the patriarchal mayor, the meddlesome postmaster, the bungling gendarmes, the omnipresent and omniscient priest.

In the end, Fernandel's honorable lad comes home from Algeria on leave and marries the girl, setting the villagers off on a grand, hatchet-burying celebration. Unfortunately and predictably, the era of goodwill is likely to last only until the next movie in the cycle sends them, with shrill Gallic cries, at each other's throats again.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.