The New Pictures
It's Always Fair Weather (M-G-M), despite its inclement title, is a sunny example of a Hollywood rarity--a song-and-dance movie with enough plot to justify its dialogue and enough needling satire to make some points. Fair Weather's good fellows who get together are Gene Kelly (also, with Stanley Donen, the film's co-director and co-dancemaster), Dan Dailey and feather-footed Michael Kidd, the dancer and choreographer, in his first film role. Returning to the U.S. when World War II ends, the three army pals, mutually jittery about the prospects of renewed civilian life, ricochet up and down Manhattan's sleazy Third Avenue in one of the most ably choreographed binges ever unreeled.
Ten years later the three buddies reunite in their favorite saloon and are shocked to find that their boozy camaraderie of yore is dead as yesterday's glass of beer. Their strained efforts to rekindle brotherly love first produce boredom, then brotherly loathing. Kelly has degenerated into a Broadway fast-buck man who manages a double-dealing prizefighter; Dailey has overblown himself into a slobbish, ulcer-ridden TV idea man; Kidd, the papa of five of them, runs a crummy Schenectady diner specializing in "Cordon Blue" hamburgers.
At this point, the movie cries for woo and woe. Both are obligingly served forthwith. As a knowledge-spouting (her defense against wolves) TV career woman, Cyd Charisse pops up to convince Kelly that, for her sweet sake, he cannot let his fighter take a dive. Dailey also has a crisis: the star of his outrageously successful TV program, Midnight with Madeline (a part that features some fine burlesque by Dolores Gray), temperamentally revolts against her prospective guest of the evening, a Bronx crackpot whose claim to fame is his model of the Taj Mahal, constructed in 16 years with nothing but chewing-gum wrappers. The three ex-G.I.s are unwittingly shanghaied as substitutes for the crackpot, and from there on, Fair Weather breezes on to a stormy climax--a brawl between the good fellows and the bad fight fixers, in full view of 60 million televiewers.
For its superb dancing, inventive musical numbers, witty spoofery of TV's overstuffed brass and mawkish product-hawking of such goodies as H2O Cola, as well as its spirited jabs and gibes at Madison Square Garden's crooks and pug-ugly environs, Fair Weather rates as one of the top contenders for the year's lightweight title.
The Sheep Has Five Legs (Raoul Ploquin; United Motion Picture Organization) is French Comedian Fernandel's 150th film and a rollicking demonstration of his virtuosity. The Frenchman with the face that has launched a thousand faces has long been a favorite in Europe, but outside the eclectic alcoves of big-city art theaters and the covers of Philippe Halsman's remarkable photographic interview, The Frenchman, he is hardly known in the U.S. Already booked for showing in 33 cities across the U.S., French-made Sheep should at last give many U.S. moviegoers their long-overdue chance to meet Fernandel, and give him the American audience he deserves.
In his broader, slapstick way, Fernandel in Sheep takes on the tricky business of multiple roles, after the fashion of Alec (Kind Hearts and Coronets) Guinness. Separately, and in some technically flawless group scenes, he plays Papa Saint-Forget, a crippled, bitter old vintner, and five quintuplet sons, Alain, Bernard, Charles, Desire, and Etienne. The episodic action begins in Trezignan, a French village where some 39 years before the film begins, Papa Saint-Forget, wanting a daughter, has become the unhappy parent of the five boys. In an effort to revive the prosperity that was Trezignan's when the quints were babies and the glory of all France, a committee decides to round up the brothers for a gala celebration of their 40th birthday.
Papa Saint-Forget would just as soon forget his offspring--they had been taken away from him as infants and designated a "national monument" by the government. To make matters worse, the five, in the old man's view, had all turned out unsatisfactorily. "At their mother's funeral," he fumes, "they appeared, wearing gloves!" Nevertheless, the committee decides to go ahead with the fete, dispatches the boys' godfather to round them up. As portrayed by Fernandel, they are an odd lot indeed:
-- Alain is the famous proprietor of Paris' most chichi beauty salon, a bewildering institution where the elegant clientele has its hair dried in battalion formation, and even the elevator boy speaks English. As Alain, in a ruffled shirt, Fernandel minces convincingly through a parade of slapstick situations, slathering cold cream on a dowager's jowls, roguishly examining a shapely leg, fawning over the telephone.
-- Desire, the family failure, is a charming fellow who supports his pregnant wife and four small daughters by washing windows for an undertaker and borrowing from brother Alain. He hits on a scheme to enrich himself when the agate-eyed undertaker offers him 60,000 francs to sign a "dying wish," asking Alain to provide him with a de luxe funeral. The undertaker thereupon makes Desire sick through autosuggestion, and rapidly pushes him to the brink of the de luxe funeral, only to drop dead himself. Desire recovers instantly and signs himself (and Alain) up for fancy burials with half the morticians of Paris, for the usual advance cash commission.
-- Etienne, a raffish, hairy-chested sea captain on a filthy freighter, appears in the film's funniest sequence: after losing all his money and his cargo of sewing machines ("At least that's what the labels say," explains the mate) in a cutthroat poker game with three lugubrious seamen, he offers 1) his ship, and 2) a monumentally configured and barely clothed native girl that he happens to own, in one last, grand gamble. The other players spurn the ship at first, but accept when the dame is offered as collateral. Etienne's bet: a trapped fly will light on his lump of sugar, rather than his opponents'.
-- Bernard is a bearded journalist, masquerading as ''Tante Nicole," an advice-to-the-lovelorn columnist, who is a sort of tenderhearted Gallic Mary Haworth.
-- Father Charles is a forlorn priest who has become the laughingstock of his parish because of his remarkable resemblance to Cinemactor Fernandel as a priest in The Little World of Don Camilla (TIME, Jan. 19, 1953). Gloomily surrounded by packed suitcases, he is about to grow a beard and go to live among the Eskimos when the godfather arrives.
Eventually, the quints are reunited with Papa Saint-Forget at the big birthday party, and the film winds up in fine farcical style with an ending that is obvious yet surprising, tickling credulity while taxing it. The film has been subtly directed by Henri Verneuil, handsomely produced by Raoul Ploquin, admirably helped with a good supporting cast. But Fernandel is a Judas goat who leads every minute of Sheep to its zany consummation. With the slightest nuances of his elastic face--a leer, a bucktoothed grin, a cocker-spaniel look of sadness--he proves that he is one of the most versatile comedians alive.
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