St. Louis Post-Dispatch from St. Louis, Missouri • Page 35

A Night Out With the Snipple Bean Lovers Myles Standish The New Films Foirett of Them All MAGNIFICENT fe the word for the Warner Brothers fcchievement in putting "MY FAIR LADY" on the screen. The movie version of the Broadway stage hit with libretto by Alan Jay Lerner and musk: by Frederick Loewe, which Old German Dish Draws Crouds To American Legion Festival Held Annually in St. Charles opened at the AMBASSADOR THEATER test night, in this reviewer'i opinion is the most beautiful, the wittiest and most entrancing musical ever brought to the toreen. In the first place, producer Jack Warner and veteran director George Cukor had the good sense not to tamper with the 1 IP Mrs. Ralph Bredenbeclc prepares to serve some snipple beans.

By Hoyt Allien original They only enhanced it with greater scope and epulence and a little rore variety in sets than was possible en the stage. This is adornment, not with vulgarity but with the finest of taste. Cecil Beaton, who designed the costumes for the stage show, was given unlimited play in designing not only the elegant and lovely costumes for the movie, but the imposing sets as well, from the gloomy grandeur of Covent Garden to the glitter of the ballroom at the Embassy. The photography by Harry Stradling, in Panavision 70 and Technicolor, is strikingly beautiful. Rex Harrison, who originated the role of Prof.

Henry Higgins on Broadway, repeats it for the screen and makes you believe that no one else on earth could do It half as well. He IS Higgins. It is a biting, caustic performance of Incisive force Harrison describes it himself as "being Irascible without being unpleasant" and he makes Higgins's overweening male ego and bullying rudeness acidly comic. He handles the fast patter songs such as "Why Can't the "I'm an Ordinary Man," and "Hymn to Him," with authority and style and with a crackling clarity of diction that befits a phonetics expert, enabling the listener to savor bits of lyrics often lost in the rush when done by other singers. There was much preproduction criticism because Audrey Hepburn was cast as Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney flower girl, instead of the charming Julie Andrews, who created the role on Broadway.

Well, there needn't be any alarm. Miss Hepburn is great. She is an actress of high talent who rings the changes from whining, strident Cockney to a lady of polished diction with conviction and a fine comic sense. If one must look for a flaw in this nearly perfect picture, it might be said that Miss Hepburn is too inherently beautiful, In spite of greasy, lanky hair, tattered clothes and dirty fingernails, to be ever quite the creature described by Prof. Higgins as "so deliciously low, so horribly dirty." But as the lady turned out by Higgins's tutelage she is so radiant that she would have fooled anyone.

The singing voice, largely dubbed for her by Marni Nixon, who has done the same thing for numerous other feminine stars in movie musicals, is a fresh and warm soprano of quality. Stanley Holloway repeats his Broadway role of Eliza's dustman father, Alfred Doolittle, "most original moralist in England," with great comic relish and infectious verve in the catchy songs, "With a Little Bit of Luck" and "Get Me to the Church on' Time." Wilfred Hyde-White was a good choice for the amiable and kindly Col. Pickering, and excellent casting is carried on with Gladys Cooper as Higgins's Jeremy Brett as the love-smitten society nitwit, Freddie Eynsford-Hill, Theodore Bikel as Karpathy, the phony phonetics teacher, and Mona Washbourne as the housekeeper. One never tires of this music. It is lovely and vivacious, even in the comic songs and in the orchestral obbligatos to Higgins's half-spoken songs.

"Wouldn't It Be Loverly?" sung by Eliza and the costermongers, Is haunting indeed, and "On the Street Where You Live," sung by Brett (or a rich tenor voice dubbed for his) is a soaring romantic ballad. And once gain, a salute to Lerner (who also did the screenplay) for having availed himself so copiously of the wit of Bernard Shaw (from whose play, "Pygmalion," this was adapted). And for having caught the Shavian spirit in his lively lyrics. So, hail to "My Fair Lady." Long may she reign, and may she find place on one of Prof. Higgins's towering bookshelves for the Oscar she will undoubtedly win.

What's Troubling Sieve McQueen? "BABY THE RAIN MUST FALL," at the ESQUIRE THEATER, is an example of unrealized possibilities. The team that turned out the fine "To Kill a Mockingbird" producer Alan Pakula, director Robert Mulligan and screenwriter By Scott C. Dint, Poit-Diipttch Photograph Harry Tiesing uses nine huge Iron kettles in cooking the beans. mit that now and then someone comes along who doesn't like them. In fact, one small boy ait the festival said as much and flatly refused to take a second bite.

As for us, when we had finished we were at peace with aM the world except the last two notches of our belt. But as for photographer Dine, he was gazitag at his plate with a strange expression. "The pork tenderloin," he said diplomat-ically, "is delicious." us. "We needed money for our child welfare program, and Legion baseball, end the hospital equipment program and so on, and someone said, 'How about sniipple "We ail said, 'Snipple because at first it was like suggesting potatoes and gravy. And the man said, 'Sure, everybody around here loves snipple beans.

Give them all they can We decided to try it, and 375 people showed up. It gets bigger every year, and we've already passed the 5O0-mark to turning, away people who kept coming for ttie next two hours." With a testimonial like that the snipple bean must have something, we concluded, so test Saturday we presented our-self at the Legion Hall in St. Charlies, a huge old 15 -room converted mansion hard by the county courthouse. A crush of people filled the big main hall, overflowed into other rooms and down into the bar in the basement. We glanced into the dining room, which had been enlarged by teaming out partitions to combine three big rooms into one, amd we saw half a dozen long tables, each accommodating about 30 persons, already filled with guests doing full justice to the snipple beans.

Meers, who was acting as maitre d', steered us through the crowd, then through the kitchen and out into the back yard where Harry Tiesing, the chief cook, was stirring his last kettle of snipple beans. In every organization there is always someone who seems to wind up doing the cooking, and Tiesing is that man at the sniipple bean festival. He has been doing it every year for eight years. Tiesing is a short, peppery little man with thinning hair who takes his cooking seriously. He was presiding over a huge iron kettle sat over an open fire.

It was one of nine which he had kept going all "WHAT YOU DO," he explained, "is cook 450 pounds of pork tenderloin until it's tender. Then you take out the tenderloin and take it in the kitchen where the women, members of the Legion Auxiiliary, start slicing it. You save the broth from the tenderloin to cook the snipple beans in." Perhaps we should mention at this point that the Legion speNs it "schnipple" beans, but for the sake of convenience we'll stick to the more popular spell that," she said, holding out her two hands, "and you put those in the bottom of a five-gallon crock. Then you take a single handful of salt and sprinkle that on. Then another double handful of beans and a handful of salt, and so on urtW they're all used up.

Then another sprinkling of salt on the top. "You cover the crock with a clean cloth and let it sit aill night. Then next morning you stir them up amd put them in sterilized quart jars. Add a tablespoon of salt water. Put enough salt in the waiter so that it will float an egg that's how you can tell.

But be sure to leave a little space at the top, because it's going to ooze. "Put the jars where it's pret-'ty warm, and soon it will start oozing all around the rim. When it quits oozing, seal the jars tight. Let them sit far 90 days and they're ready to cook. "SOME PEOPLE," Mrs.

Tiesing continued, "just leave it in the crock ana use the beans as they need them. They taste about the same, maybe a little more sour. They smell to high heaven in fact, 6ome people refer to them as 'stinkbeans' but we prefer them in jars." In October, about 50 Legionnaires and their wives gather at the Legion Hall and snipple beans for the coming festival. "We put up 336 quarts this year," Mrs. Tiesing said.

"We put them up in the attic, and they oozed all over everything. We used 120 quarts for the feed tonight, and sold the rest at $1 a quart." We wanted to buy a quart, but learned that we were too late. They were long Since sold out. Mrs. Tiesing said just about everybody of German descent makes and eats snipple beans.

"My husband's folks ad my folks as far back as I can remember I was a Klingham-mer." We made our way through the crowd and out into the kitchen, where we found ourselves in the pie department IjfrtMMlllfai night. Vacancies at the tables were still being filled as fast as any presided over by Mrs. Doug Baschert and Mrs. Flo Moraty. "The wives made the pies," said Mrs.

Baschert, "110 of then. Goodness, I don't know how many different kinds'. Let's see, we have apple, cherry, lemon, rhubarb, coconut cream, egg custard, peach, chocolate end pecan." Mrs. Theodore Blase a keeping three big coffee urns going. By 6 o'clock she had used 15 pounds of coffee and Bill Remer, who was in charge of the bread, bad dlished out 36 loaves.

He asked how we liked the snipple beans. We said we hadn't had time to try them yet, and he said once we had eaten them we'd be back for more. "I make up some for myself every year," he said, "a few jars." ONE GROUP of men and women in the kitchen was doing nothing but putting up "carry-out" orders. "We've sold dozens of them," one of them said, "which suits us fee. We make more money, because one order is all they get.

Some of those people in the dining roam will eat aid night." We encountered Clarence Williams, commander of the post. "The whole thing started eight years ago, when we were sitting around trying to think up some way to make money," he told body finished, so we' suggested to Meers that they put us and photographer Scott Dine in the kitchen. We sat down to a huge bowl of sniipple beans, a big KIEL OPERA HOUSE TOMORROW I SUNDAV 8:40 P.M. 2:30 P.M. GINA BACHAUER Piano Soost BEETHOVEN FESTIVAL Overture to Coriolanus Concerto No.

4 Symphony No. 7 SEATS SELLING at AeolFon Ticket Office, 1004 Olive Kiel Auditorium. TICKET PRICES: Box Seats, Meuanine, Orchestra, Lower Balcony, $2.75, Upper Balcony, $1.75. $1.10. Mail orders accepted.

Enclose with remittance, stamped -addressed envelope for ticket mailing, SYMPIIOXr ORCHESTRA ELEAZAR DE CARVALHO, Conductor Horton Foote did this film, and as one would expect, it has mood, atmosphere, naturalism, compassion and poignancy. But its lack of clarity, murkiness of motivation and failure at solution leave it hanging, a disappointing letdown after early promise. It's not that it's downbeat; the downbeat is muffled and indecisive. platter of pork tenderloin and a pile of French bread with a jar of apple butter. We know you've been wondering.

WeM, snipple beans will never make tine gourmet list But on the other hand, as a pleasant blend of common and familiar foods they are good to the taste, filling, obviously nourishing, and they are credited by many with restorative qualities such as warding oif spring fever and toning up the system generally. If you pin him down you may get a snipple bean lover to ad WE HAVE TASTED smjpple beans and we pronounce them a success. We doubt very much if they will ever take the place of the hamburger and apple pi as symbols of the American diet, but we fed safe in saying that the sniipple bean is here to stay. One reason we are confident is Chat it has been around for a good many years now and is still going strong. It's quite passible that you never heard of snipple beams if your ancestors didn't come from Germany.

We never had until we received a letter some time ago addressed to the column on cuisine which we do in the Everyday Magazine each Thursday. The letter came from a man who wanted to know if we could supply a recipe for the snipple beans his mother used to serve when he was a youngster. He even recalled some nostalgia how he used to cut his little hands almost to ribbons slicing green beans on the bias to make sniipple beans. We had never heard of these beans, we admitted, and asked any readers who knew about them to send the recipe. We were hardly prepared for what followed.

Some people didn't even waft to write. Our telephone started ringing the next maming. The callers were appalled and a little hurt that we didn't know about snipple beans, which are as dear to GermainnAmerieans as sauerkraut once was supposed to be. The beans were brought to this country by German settlers almost 150 yeans ago, and they aire a staple, a mainstay, a veritable bulwark of the German cuisine. THE TELEPHONE calls were followed by a flood of letters.

Nearly every letter began by taking us to task for being so abysmally ignorant, and then proceeded to tell us not only how to "lay down" a batch of the beams but how to cook them. Two things we learned from the letters. One was that while all the snipple bean recipes were basically alike, no two were quite the same. Just as every woman has her own recipe for apple pie, snipple bean makers have their own little differences. The other thing we learned is that there are almost endless mutations in the spelling of snipple.

Some had it "schmi-ple;" others, "schnipple," and still others, "sdbmiple" or even "schniffel." Wfth the aid of a German American dictionary we learned that the original German name was Schnippel-bohnen, which means snipped beans. To schmippel means to snip, and that's what you do first to the beams, but it's just a small part of what most of the German American have come to refer to as snipple beans. Shortly after we Wormed our readers about snipple beans, there appeared at our desk a short, pleasant, bald-headed man named Herman Meers, who came from St. Charles and who wanted to know if we had ever eaten snipple beans. We had to confess that we hadn't.

Whereupon Meers disclosed that he had come as a spokesman for the American Legion post in St. Charles to offer us an opportunity to eat all the sniipple beans we could hold. This Struck us as a somewhat dubious opportunity since, never having tasted a snipple bean, we had no idea how many we could hold, if any. Anyway, the visitor went on to explain that each January the Legion post at St. Charles puts on a mammoth snipple bean festival.

All the snipple beans and other things you can eat for $1.50 "children six bits," he added. And since we had more or less put snipple beans on the map around here, he said, the Legionnaires would be honored to have us as their guest. "Do people actually pay money to cat snipple beans?" we wanted to know. With a sStghtly Injured took Meers replied, "Last year we had served 485 persons when we unfortunately ran out of snipplt beans, and had to start Steve McQueen, who has become the epitome of the brooding, beatnik antihero of Hollywood "realistic" drama, is a paroled convict who goes to join his wife and daughter in a small Texas town. (He had been sentenced for stabbing a man in a drunken brawl.) He is ambitious tobecome a songwriter, and meanwhile earns his living ai a singing guitar player in cheap roadhouses.

He sincerely tries to make go of it and loves his wife (Lee Remick). But his moody nature leads to -violent tantrums, and finally, after he desecrates the grave 4of the woman who was his custodian as boy, he is sent back the pen. That's all there is to it. What was eating at Steve's innards to make him behave -that way? No explanation. Why did he hate his foster-mother? tYou just have to guess.

There Is no psychological probing of emotional turmoil, his twisted psyche, his frustrations 'and yearnings. K's just an unfinished portrait of an inarticulate rebel who can't adjust to society. Aa far as it is allowed to go, McQueen's performance is excellent forceful and bursting with chcked-up emotion. He makes you feel sorry for him. Miss Remick, too, comes through as the brave and appealing wife.

Don Murray, how-lever, has a thankless role for his talent as a kindly deputy 'theriff who has little to do but stand around and sympathize. Ann Landers 'Above9 Her Husband DEAR ANN LANDERS: I am a college graduate. My husband dropped out of high school in the tenth grade when his father died. I didn't notice the wide intellectual gulf separated Henry and me until we had been married I several months. Hunrv'i ornmmar so bad it is embarrassing.

He luftaVtaeelAAAAJUBAAAAAAeBJUU riVyrarcraM! i TcWtTlTQ her now? -BBr tfclX Somehow fKv kes TTTTn VJMlrJ WaS' lmehowshe's l.lnlll UyhJalway5therer PTTTHR tf-M Wr li'UiiifiU if Vfyj; i fifm Iy CWf "Love With The 4, vTl vx-X i flTifTAn iTTTfTh (( STARTS Week Days open 5 p.m., Adults $1.25 PwBHMt TODAY Clayton M. it llf Bens' Bird. ing. "You cook the snipple beans by themselves in the meat broth," Tiesing continued. "I cooked 120 quarts of them.

Then you cook 80 pounds of navy beans and 260 pounds of diced potatoes. Then you combine the snipple beans, the navy beans and the potatoes, let them all cook together for about three more hours, and that's all there is to it." AS THE BEANS were done they were transferred to big stainless steel pots and were taken into the kitchen to be kept hot until served. There were about a dozen women in the kitchen, all dishing snipple beans into serving bowls which men wearing white aprons and Legion caps were carrying, at a half trot, to the tables. The menu consisted of sniipple beans, sliced pork tenderloin piled on big platters, spicy homemade apple butter, French bread, pie and coffee. Whenever a seat was vacated there was someone on hand to fill it, but the turnover wasn't very fast.

Snipple bean lovers are hearty eaters. We asked who was the best snipple beam maker among the Legion wives, and it turned out to be Mrs. Tiesing, a pleasant gray -haired woman who proceeded to tell us how to make snipple beans. "We'll do it on the basis of a bushel of green beans," she said. "That's how many I usually put up at home.

After you've washed the beans you have to snipple, or cut them. They're cut longways, sort of on the bias. There is a snipplw, but you have to send to Germany to get one. You can Just feed the beams in and turn a crank. But mast people do ft by hand.

"You lay the beans out on the palm of your left hand, longways, and take a sharp knife in your right hand and just cut toward you, like this." She demonstrated. "Yes, you have to he careful or youl cult yourself. It takes practice. "Then, when the beans ar anippled you lav them down. You tak doubk handful M.4 is not informed on world affairs.

When he attempts to discuss politics it is parent he hasn't read a thing. The friends Henry brings home from the office are uninformed and shallow. Their wives are stupid and dull. I've abandoned all hope of communicating with them. What can a wife do when iC- mr iwer 1 Ann Landers 1 fh'W starved intellectually? I'va met some bright young women through my club but I wouldn't dream of inviting thera and their husbands to our home.

They'd be bored to death by Henry. Any advice? I ONE WHO TRADED DOWN Dear Traded: Maybe these dull wives can't distinguish between a Picasso and a hola la the rug but you might pick up soma useful hints on how to re- move an Ink spot from a white damask table cloth. Satisfy your Intellectual appetite in the afternoon. If yon were half as smart as you think you are you wouldn't bo knocking your husband's limited educa- tion. You'd be building him up for doing at well at ba has in spite of it.

(P.S.: Ha was smart enough to marry you, wasn't ht?) ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH J. 22. 3D i I.