Let me lay it on the line: I like movies, and approach them with a tolerance so fond that it will possibly strike you as simple-minded. To engage my glazed attention a movie need be no classic of its kind, need be neither L'Avventura nor Red River, neither Casablanca nor Citizen Kane; I ask only that it have its moments. I make excuses to be at home whenever Wendell Corey is slithering in and out of The Big Knife on the Late Show; I pull up the covers and settle in with mindless delight when Katharine Hepburn sweeps into The Philadelphia Story. I weep when James Stewart brings The Spirit of St. Louis in over the coast of Ireland, weep when Joel McCrea tells America how The Lights Are Going Out All Over Europe Tonight in Foreign Correspondent; weep even when James Mason flounders into the surf at Malibu in the Judy Garland A Star is Born, a remake considered slightly infra dig among real late-movie cultists. (They may not be the Cahiers de Cinema crowd, but they do have their rules, and one of those rules is that the Star Is Born to see is the Star Is Born with Janet Gaynor.)
Mostly in order to maintain this note of mellow good feeling for a few more paragraphs, I will even go so far as to admit an ineradicable affection for certain movies which lack even Moments, but have instead an impenetrable gloss of spirit and charm and attractiveness, airily impervious to even the most spurious stabs at reality. The current trend in this kind of two-hour sedative is something Time writers like to call "black comedy" (only they generally say it in French), which involves placing some exceptionally pretty people in some exceptionally pretty landscape, introducing a menace (a Fat Man will usually do to represent menace; if not a Fat Man, a man with a hook instead of a hand, or a wooden leg, or anything at all that will lend itself to ominous camera work), and letting the exceptionally pretty people figure out, in as scenic a way as possible, around which exceptionally pretty corner the menace
This season's edition is. of course, Charade, in which we are asked, not very insistently, to pretend that Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn are in deep trouble in Paris and Mégève. Since the plot does not bear close tracking, let me note simply that Cary Grant still looks imperishable, Audrey Hepburn still looks like a Givenchy foundling, and the entire affair is carried off as a mild joke upon itself, notwithstanding a mortality rate which approximates that of The Big Sleep.
Carl Foreman’s The Victors is a bad movie: its shoddiness runs deep. A collection of sentimental clichés tricked out in the paraphernalia of Serious Moviemaking (mostly it looks like an Eisenstein movie caught in the process of metastasis). The Victors illustrates, strenuously, Foreman's belief that war "degrades the victors equally with the vanquished." If this seems in the first place a notion of not exactly relentless intellectual originality, it seems even less so when it develops that that's all there is in the movie, there isn't any more. The prevailing style is Ironic Juxtaposition, and the prevailing players are George Hamilton and George Peppard, who in fact prevail so long — through the whole of World War II and deep into the Berlin Occupation — that I began, in the absence of anything else to think about (like a plot, say), to wonder why they didn't have enough points to go home.
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