Rhinestone Quarry

By J.C.

40 CARATS

Directed by MILTON KATSELAS

Screenplay by LEONARD GERSHE

Liv Ullmann is still a fine actress. That is easy enough to see in 40 Carats without, thankfully, having to pay close attention to the movie. It is difficult to imagine who might want to pay attention, who might seek out and revel in this shriveled farce with its stilted people and wilted jokes.

The irritating plot concerns the bumpy progress of a generation-gap love affair between a Manhattan real estate woman (Ullmann), who is 40 years old and tense about it, and the head of labor relations for a large steel company (Edward Albert), who is a vehemently mature 22. They meet on holiday in Greece. Her car expires; he persuades her, with difficulty, to accept a lift on his Honda, plies her with ouzo, and after a while--too long a while --they spend a blissful night together on the beach. They meet again in New York, where he shows up by chance one night to take her 17-year-old daughter on a date. There is great fluttering and consternation that result in several dubious subplots involving a good-natured ex-husband (Gene Kelly), a kleptomaniac mother (Binnie Barnes) and a suitor from out West (Billy Green Bush), who is given to such admiring exclamations as "Wahoo! When you get yourself together you really get everything in the right place."

40 Carats is a brazenly ugly film in the way only Hollywood studio products can be when they try to look stylish. Miss Ullmann is deft and charming despite it all. When she kisses Albert goodbye the morning after their beach idyll, she brushes her lips close to his face in a moment of quiet poignancy; later, when she describes Albert and defends their relationship, she speaks with glee and the pride of a woman feeling a kind of renewal.

However good they are, these moments do not resolve the central question of what Ullmann, one of the screen's best young actresses, is doing in a film so deadeningly unimaginative and mechanical. 40 Carats is better than Lost Horizon--anything would be --but it is perilously below her best abilities. . J.C.

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