Tarnished Cherub

In folk tales, the power that changes a frog to a prince is called magic. In life, it is known as nostalgia. Wrapped in it, a newspaper becomes an illuminated manuscript, a vulgar city is transformed into El Dorado. Ben Hecht, once one of the highest-paid scenarists in Hollywood, had a nostalgia factory for a brain; what went in as the apprenticeship of a yellow journalist emerged as gilded celebrations of innocence.

The resultant movie, Gaily, Gaily, is a kind of Tom Jones in Chicago, a broad-shouldered knockabout farce that has no business being so comic--but is hugely funny because of Director Norman Jewison.

As young Ben, Beau Bridges (son of Actor Lloyd Bridges) plays the hero with the numbstruck charm of a tarnished cherub. Ben believes totally in America's favorite myth: the up-from-nothing success story. So believing, he becomes living proof of that other American truism: there's a sucker born every minute. Ben runs away to Chicago, sin city, carnival to a million peculators in wheat, meat and railways. Pickpockets, exposure and starvation nearly do him in until the boy comes under the wing of a municipal madam named Queen Lil (Melina Mercouri). Lil's most valued friend is one Francis X. Sullivan (Brian Keith), a gruff newspaperman who booms about integrity and who would sell his grandmother for a headline.

In Jewison's The Russians Are Coming, Keith began a new career as a deadpan comedian. Now, teamed with Bridges, he gives the liveliest performance of his career as an agnostic Catholic and whoremaster-repentant whose right hand has not consulted his left for 40 years. The pro and the amateur barge around the gaudy streets of a meticulously reconstructed 1910 Chicago, hungry for trouble. Ben treats each new experience as if he were staring down the well of life. One time he falls in and drowns. But if life is a cheat, death is a double-dealer. On a morgue slab, Ben is given a dose of Adrenalin by a quack. In an outrageous parody of the Lazarus scene dear to so many biblical spectacles, Ben rises, so full of life that he quivers like a tuning fork for hours.

Like Ben, Abram S. Ginnes' manic screenplay brims with hellishly good intentions that never quite come off. Jewison has thus been forced to pare his film drastically. Plot and continuity skip along in a flurry of quick cuts and undeveloped skits. Perhaps it is just as well. Hecht was invariably sodden with sentimentality except when he wrote with a collaborator--as in The Front Page. In editing Gaily, Gaily, Jewison has played a latter-day Charles MacArthur to Hecht's Hecht.

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