The New Pictures

Saddle the Wind (MGM) is a not altogether successful attempt to mingle culture and coyotes. The culture is provided by John Cassavetes, a Stanislavsky-type buckaroo who looks sort of lost in all those wide-open spaces.

One day the kid rides home with a gun ("the fastest in the West") and a girl (Julie London), and pretty soon he starts to abuse them both. The girl he kisses, as she puts it, "like you paid money for the privilege." The gun he fires at anybody whose looks he doesn't happen to like. All this is mighty upsetting to Robert Taylor, the kid's big brother. "I wanted him straight," he sighs, "that's all. But he was rotten leather and he came apart." So in the end it's brother against brother, but as they say down Texas way, "Yew kin saddle the wind, but yew cain't ride it." Taking the bitter with the better, Saddle the Wind is a pretty good western. Rod Serling's script is intelligible, and Actor Taylor has acted in enough horse operas to appear at ease on a horse.

The High Cost of Loving (MGM) is a clever little watercooler farce with kitchenette complications. The hero (Jose Ferrer) and heroine (Gena Rowlands) are a nice young suburban couple. Two cars, no kids, both work--she in a gift shop ("It's For Them"), he in industry (purchasing department). One morning she happily announces that after nine years of trying they are finally going to have a baby. At work he prematurely passes the cigars and takes the joshing. ("Here's a man who has proved that anything can be done if you keep on trying," cracks one of the boys, and papa modestly replies, "It wasn't easy.")

Then all at once the hero's bubble of prosperity bursts. He fails to receive an invitation to an important executive luncheon, at which the management intends to separate the sheep from the goats, and he concludes that his career has gone from baa to worse. At home he tries manfully not to blubber ("They don't want me any more"), and his wife takes dismal, comical inventory of the monthly payments they must meet. "Well, there's the new hot-water heater . . . the garbage-disposal unit, the washer and dryer, the TV and the hifi, the new divan and those silly chairs that match, the gas range, the Deepfreeze, the power mower, the electric barbecue, the dining suite, the bedroom suite ..." The only thing they can do, the husband ruefully decides, is cut down on luxuries--like food.

In the end, of course, the hero's recession proves to be nothing worse than a readjustment; nevertheless, in its hilarious conclusion, the picture does not fail to point a serious moral: uneasy lies the neck that wears a white collar.

HCL has one important fault: it plays its satire too safe. But the script, by Rip Van Ronkel, is written with a nice sense of pace. The camera, moreover, is wittily used. The long, slow start in which the husband and wife go through the motions of getting ready for work is a piece of slickly observed americana. The acting is sound, too, even in the side parts. Best of all is the work of Director Jose Ferrer, who has even managed to coax a graceful, flexible performance out of wooden-faced Leading Man Jose Ferrer.

The Confessions of Felix Krull

(DCA). The Germans, no matter what the rest of the world says, have a wonderful sense of humor--if only they were not so serious about it. This picture, adapted from the last novel published by the late Thomas Mann, is a classic instance of deutscher Witz: a good joke, badly told but brilliantly explained, heartily laughed at by the teller, laboriously retold from several other angles, and reduced, in conclusion, to its philosophic essence. In this case, unfortunately, the essence is a dull epigram. "Love the world," Mann's hero cries, "and the world will love you." The statement expresses the mercantile theory of morals, and Mann's man (Henry Bookholt), faithfully represented on the screen, is intended to embody it. Born in the Rhineland, Felix Krull begins life as the son of a somewhat shady operator who manufactures phony champagne. Deftly dodging the draft with a feigned fit of epilepsy, Felix lights out for Paris to live by his wits. He rehearses them at the border. When a wealthy woman, Mme. Houpfle (Susi Nicoletti), stands next to Felix during customs inspection, her jewel case somehow gets mixed up with his belongings, and he finds himself just too shy to mention the fact. Theft? Perhaps. But Felix likes to think of it as "manipulated luck."

In Paris the young adventurer hires on as a lift boy in a posh hotel. And who turns up? The lady of the jewel case, of course. It develops that her husband owns "the biggest pate factory in Strasbourg," and the wife lives high on the goose. More luck, and Felix manipulates it skillfully. The lady tears the uniform off him one evening, flings him into bed. Later she forces him to steal the rest of her jewels while she cries: "Oh, how delightfully you debase me."

And so on, from one enriching experience to another. From hoopla with Houpfle to Unsinn with Zouzou, from Paris to Lisbon, from an elevator to a marquisate--it is all intended to be good, brisk picaresque, but somehow (perhaps partly because of the turgid English subtitles), it sounds more like bad libretto.

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