The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 539

Movies So Little From So Much BY CHARLES CHAMPLIN -i li TEC''' A' i i i -i 4 ft ORSON WELLES IN 'CASINO ROYALE? CONSPICUOUS WASTE first public version. The casualties included one whole character (Her-schel Bernardi as a Hollywood agent) and the establishing backgrounds of the three ladies who come to Venice in quest of Harrison's pot of honey. Edie Adams, Capuchine and Susan Hayward thus become elegant but inert figures and the movie a rather tame and almost inadvertent murder mystery. Harrison makes the progressive revelation of his own true character bright and interesting, but he becomes, you might say, a blinding Venetian who leaves everybody else in the 'dark. "The Happiest Millionaire" has the Walt Disney trademarks of a brighter-than-life innocence, some vividly engaging people, uncomplicatedly tuneful music, comical moments and solid 'production values.

It is, as they say, wholesome family fare. Yet, in terms of the expectations one had for it, "The Happiest Millionaire," too, has been a disappointment. Here, as well, the basic fault lies largely with the story premise. Fred MacMurray as the happy millionaire Mr. Biddle is, of course, the central figure.

Not having seen the Broadway stage version, I'm unable to say to what extent Walter Pidgeon dominated the proceedings there. But on film a very unsettling diffusion of interest occurs. "Mary Poppins" was Mary Poppins ren and John Davidson, is marvelous, and Tommy Steele (who dominates the picture from the scullery, as it were) has the brash, brassy, captivating presence of the true musical star. Critically, "Woman Times Seven" has elsewhere received the hardest knocks of any of these pictures. The reason may lie in a way critics have of being toughest on films for which they held high, if thwarted, hopes.

The notion of a film consisting of seven short stories written by Cesare Zavattini and directed by Vittorio De Sica and all featuring Shirley MacLaine is fairly unorthodox and interesting. i mi mm-mmmmmmT'mpiQ 1 The standard line is that nobody ever sets out to make a bad movie. And that's always true, particularly if you go by a front office definition which says a bad picture is one which doesn't make money and a good picture is one which does. It can also be said that nobody sets out to make a disappointing film. But, at a guess, a film critic could use "disappointing" about as often as any word in his lexicon.

To me, a "bad" film is so conspicuously wasteful, so wrongly intended, so ineptly executed and so energetically untasteful as to be actively annoying. And, in truth, relatively few films these days are, in those terms, genuinely bad. Movies, that is, may or may not be better than ever, but they are less bad than ever. Economics and tougher audiences (a redundancy if there ever was one have generally seen to that. But there are a pretty fair number of movies even those about which one or several good things can be said which qualify as disappointing.

These are the films which seemed to have had the premise, the production resources and the talents on both sides of the camera to amount to more than they did. It is not that the critic or the viewer faults them for not being what they did not intend to be, but for failing to bring off what they obviously set out to do. This increase of disappointment stems in good part from the fact that film audiences are now caught up in their own kind of revolution of rising expectations. It only takes a handful of artistically thrusting and successful movies to make disappointing runners-up out of a lot of other films that might have seemed quite acceptable in an earlier and less demanding time. The critic finds himself mildly obsessed to put his finger on why a given film especially a film with obvious good points qualifies as disappointing.

For "Casino Royale," disappointing is too gentle a word. In that instance, all the money and all the talent so conspicuously wasted were the problem. What the film needed was a single strong guiding intelligence to give a zany and madcap unity to a conglomeration of costly and incoherent parts. Joseph Mankiewicz' "The Honey Pot" obviously had a central guiding intelligence: his own, as writer, director and producer. He also had one of the few magical male stars around Rex Harrison and a brilliant and captivating stage comedienne enjoying her first major exposure in a movie Maggie Smith.

Still, "The Honey Pot" came off as a great deal less than the sum of its parts: tediously talky, static, only occasionally witty and less often moving. It is easy enough to see what Messrs. Mankiewicz and Harrison hoped to bring off: a glittering, epigrammatic social comedy whose theme was upper-class greed, revealed and re-revealed in a succession of ironic plot twists, a study of character on the surface and then in depth. The problem essentially is that the script bit off more than it could set forth. Given the running time, it was all "The Honey Pot" could do to accommodate the plot twists.

Indeed, 20 minutes had to be lopped out of the f. 1 Pih li ilk with improvisational strokes by the director, principally, and his cast. The first sketch, in which Miss MacLaine is a mourning widow being consoled in the funeral cortege by Peter Sellers, hints at how this improvisational fleshing-out was intended to work. De Sica's camera darts away from the principals to glance at the respectful (and disrespectful) passers-by. We see the family maid, more mournful than the widow.

We see the walkers coming to a mud puddle and taking evasive action which moves back through the cortege like a wave. It is a minor one-line vignette, but De Sica has given it a rich texture of observed reality, full of wry detail and a sense of life. But that kind of enrichment happens all too rarely through the rest of the stories. One significant clue may be that while the first vignette, like all the others, is set in Paris, it seems a broadly European rather than specifically Gallic piece of business. A supportive clue shows up in another sketch.

In that one Miss MacLaine as a tarty gold -digging wife throws a screaming fit in an elegant salon. In Naples or Rome, the courturier might just have screamed back, making for a lively and earthy match. In Paris, she screams alone and the effect is, as much as anything else, embarrassing. The point is that the French milieu is not the Italian milieu and although De Sica is the most cosmopolitan of men in the most cosmopolitan of cities, he is not at home (and not at home with the language of the picture, which is English). There is a cultural barrier, of language, feeling and event, which I think gets in the way of De Sica's and Zavattini's intent, A generation gap also makes itself briefly felt, and in a sketch in which Miss MacLaine portrays a hippy, free-thinking translator, it is painfully clear that neither director nor author really know where it's at.

A film divided into seven parts turns out to have the unintended virtue of not saddling us for too long with any one segment. The fact is that it turned out to be even more a one-woman show than Miss MacLaine or the rest of us had expected. That she sustains our interest on charm and skill even through the roughest patches is a remarkable tribute. But as always when there are good things to say about a movie, it sharpens the regret that there are not still more. The word and I'd as-soon there wer.

less call for it is disappointing. Rex Harrison in "Honey Pof," Shirley MacLaine in "Woman Times Seven," Fred Mac-Murray in "The Happiest Millionaire" fims not as good as they should have been. and also Julie Andrews and everything that happened related directly to her fantastic talents (fictional and personal). There is no such unity of interest and identification in "The Happiest Millionaire." If there is not really, anybody to root against (except maybe Geraldine Page as the tart-tongued Mrs. Duke), there are too many people to root for, and each of them is pursuing his own story-line.

MacMurray has moments as a warm, quiet and sympathetic father, and during them he becomes the rounded personality who could have dominated the picture. More often he is asked to be a comic caricature, not really credible even within the conventions of a film musical and thus not really capable of capturing our concern. More's the pity because the chemistry of the young people, Lesley Ann War- It is unquestionably not a film for anyone who does not admire Miss MacLaine's special personality and talents. Admirers, or neutralists, must I think agree that she has done quite a job of looking and seeming to be seven different women, alike only in their concern with love or the lack of it. Pew if any other actresses come to mind 'who could have sustained an audience's interest over seven stories of widely varying quality and over some peculiarly understated direction.

Miss MacLaine, in my view does, but her personal triumph servies also to emphasize what a lone battle she was fighting in a disappointing venture. In seeking about for whys, the quality of the original stories seems only a partial explanation. They were, I gather, only fragmentary sketches, bare bones waiting to be fleshed over eieveV.