The New Pictures

The World of Suzie Wong (Ray Stark; Paramount). The prostitute is the muse of the movies. When business is bad, she is invoked by producers who hope that commercial sex will bring the customers back in slavering hordes. This fall, what with the special distraction of politics and the usual competition of new television shows, movie business has been sluggish. Reaction: a demi-epidemic of pictures about prostitution, the most severe of recent years. Now showing in the U.S.: Never on Sunday, Butterfield 8, Girl of the Night, Port of Desire, Rosemary. And last week Suzie Wong, the biggest (it cost $4,000,000, runs 129 minutes) and possibly the dullest of them all, won a dubious distinction: it became the first trollopera ever to play Manhattan's family-minded cathedral of cinema, Radio City Music Hall.

Adapted from a bestselling novel and Broadway play, Suzie Wong rewinds that limp old yarn about the poor starving artist and the floozy with a heart of gold, but this time the yarn has a new kink in it: miscegenation. The twain meet in Hong Kong, and pretty soon the hero (William Holden) is so crazy about the whoroine (Nancy Kwan) that he cannot tell the difference between good and bawd, white and Wong. Race prejudice and convention pothole the road to romance, but the lovers ride out the bumps.

Technically, the film is respectable. The street and harbor scenes in the crown colony bustle with color, the interiors are ingratiatingly ratty. Literarily, the picture is a mad chow mein of Chinese-laundry English, doused with a sickly marmalade of sentiment and soy-sauced now and then by a daffy line (prostitute announcing her baby's name: "Weenston. Hees fader velly importan' man"). Dramatically, it is just one long touristic stagger through the better bars and restaurants of Hong Kong.

The direction (Richard Quine) is vague, and the principals are rigidly confined in miscasts. Actor Holden looks more like an aging bellboy than an artist. As for Actress Kwan, an Anglo-Chinese cutie born in Hong Kong and trained in London's Royal Ballet school, she looks more like Piccadilly than Wanchai. And the film's sentimental, sanitized conception of the Oriental prostitute as a sort of rising young calendar girl who graciously takes her turn as a U.S.O. hostess will seem a cruel jest to the undernourished minions of Asia's vast sex industry, many of them dead of disease or exhaustion long before they reach the heroine's comparatively advanced age: 21.

The Love Same (AJAM; Films Around the World). "Up!" the young man (Jean-Pierre Cassel) chirps as he leaps briskly out of bed. "Grmpf!" protests the pile of bedclothes (Genevieve Cluny) he has left behind, "you didn't wake me up the usual way!" The young man looks appalled at his forgetfulness, leaps almost to the ceiling, lands back in bed. "A votre service!" he bellows.

Actor Cassel, 27, is easily the funniest Frenchman seen on screen since Jacques (Mr. Hulot's Holiday] Tati; and The Love Game, the first New Wave comedy released in the U.S., is a happy, bawdy but somehow innocent and always violently spontaneous little pa ama party. "What you do," the heroine informs the hero thoughtfully, "you do well. But--not seriously." Morbleu! he wonders. What more does the girl want? "A baby." The hero pales at the thought of marriage and fatherhood. "Fill your needs elsewhere," he proclaims indignantly. She finds a rival (Jean-Louis Maury) and gets engaged--but the rival gets cold feet, and at the fade hero tenderly promises heroine that some day, surrounded by all the children her heart desires, she may even have a wedding. Fin.

In such a fribble, treatment is everything, and the man responsible for that is Director Philippe de Broca. who never before made a movie on his own and now emerges as the biggest comic talent of the new school of Gallic cinema. Considering his youth and inexperience, De Broca's technique is startlingly mature. He has a frenzied flair for sight and prop gags, but he never lets them disturb the deeper humor of the scene--many moviegoers may for instance fail to observe that the painter-hero cleans his brushes on, of all things, an old black bra.

For De Broca, the comedy that counts is the comedy of character, and in Cassel he has found a richly responsive instrument to play on: a comedian who, like Chaplin or Marie Dressier, is more an actor than a performer. And through the character Cassel creates--a ludicrous but lovable mixture of Don Juan and Peter Pan--the moviemaker says something subtle and gently ironic about the character of urban youth in modern France. But at the core of his comedy, in scenes that hop, skip and jump like almost nothing since Rene Clair's great comedies (The Million, The Italian Straw Hat), De Broca makes a gay and warm and generous point about life itself: live it while you've got it because you only get it once.

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