The New Pictures

Richard III (London Films; Lopert), the chronicle of England's last Plantagenet* king (1452-85), is one of the most powerful yet one of the clumsiest and least poetic plays that Shakespeare wrote. It is magnificently produced in this film translation by Sir Laurence Olivier, who not only directed the picture with taste and skill of a high order, but also "monkeyed around" with the Shakespeare script --cutting, transposing, and sometimes just plain changing--in a wickedly ingenious way. The cast Olivier has assembled is a Who's Who of the British theater--Sir John Gielgud, Sir Ralph Richardson, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Claire Bloom, Pamela Brown--and they play, for the most part, with a remarkably even and deep-breathing power. Olivier himself interprets the title role with a mastery so complete that Richard III, in this generation can surely never be himself again.

The play begins, in the Olivier version, with the coronation of Richard's elder brother Edward IV. The camera peers at the proceedings past a huge head of glossy black hair. The head turns, and suddenly a long, coldly intellectual face stares straight at the spectator with an eye that catches him like a fishhook. This is Richard--lame leg, hunchback, "weerish withered arme" and all--and he is a frightening man indeed. A minute later the moviegoer is alone with the monster. "Why," he confides, as the thin lip writhes with an impish humor, "I can smile, and murder while I smile / . . . And wet my cheeks with artificial tears . . . / Can I do this, and cannot get a crown? / Tut! were it further off, I'll pluck it down!"

Next instant he is wooing the widow of a prince he recently killed "in my angry mood at Tewkesbury," and wooing her with cold precision and success even as she kneels by her husband's corpse. He plots his brother (Gielgud) into the king's disgrace, and has him murdered in the Tower--drowned, as a matter of gruesome legend, in a butt of malmsey wine. And while he waits for the aging king (Hardwicke) to die "and leave the world for me to bustle in," the "bottled spider" can teasingly tongue-tie the opposing faction ("Cannot a plain man live?") and make a lot of pious tut and pother ("I thank my God for my humility") at the deathbed of the king.

On fiercely then to royal power. The bloody buddy-buddy with Buckingham (Richardson) decapitates the opposition, and Richard III is crowned--"but shall we wear these glories for a day?" He sends two little princes, his nephews, to a strangling bed, and sheds Buckingham as coldly as last season's skin ("None are for me/That look into me with considerate eye"). The rebellions begin, and Richard is slain at last on Bosworth Field.

As cinema, Olivier's Richard is little more than a photographed play, even though it is photographed (in VistaVi-sion) with the frequent and wonderfully lively feeling that the events have somehow been caught candid. In the film sense --even though the careful medieval settings often smell too much of the theater, and the score by Sir William Walton is seldom better than appropriate--Richard is much more idiomatic and natural than Olivier's Hamlet was, though by its very subject it can never match the swallow's verve and sudden tumbling heartbeat of his Henry V.

The triumph of Richard is the triumph of sheer mummery--though inevitably the applause will not go to all the actors in equal measure. The women are excellent. Claire Bloom, as Richard's wife, has no choice but to portray a pallid case of hemi-Ophelia, but her softness is a fine contrast to the hard shape of Richard. Pamela Brown as the king's mistress, a role tellingly interpolated by Olivier, is magically effective; she says but four words ("Good morrow, my lord"), but she hangs in the offing like a sensuous portrait by Rubens, and fills the court with just the kind of sexual music Shakespeare meant when he spoke of "the lascivious pleasing of a lute."

The men have more to do, and do it sometimes with less skill. As King Edward, Sir Cedric Hardwicke is properly cardiac and feckless, but Sir John Gielgud dilutes his Clarence with so much milk of human kindness that the observer cannot really credit him with the murder he bemoans, and so the point of his big scene is lost. Sir Ralph Richardson, too, is scarcely the strong figure that the "deep-revolving, witty Buckingham" should be.

Whatever the inadequacies, Olivier more than makes up for them. His Richard is an elemental force, the principle of evil itself. The feral face (modeled, Olivier says, on the features of Broadway's Jed Harris and France's Francis I) allures the eye as a great serpent might. And Richard's ruttishness, in the amazing scene of the widow's seduction, is a slimy, cold convulsion.

At some junctures Olivier's inspirations cannot be explained at any point short of genius. His transition from the Hitleresque vaudevillain stuff in the mob scene is an act of high poetic terror: he leaps, epileptic with triumph, from his balcony to the bell rope that is tolling in his reign, and down it he goes, twirling like a mad chimpanzee in his surely insane lust to see the first man bend the knee.

Olivier sees marvelously much, but there is something vital he overlooks: that there was warm blood as well as cold in Richard's medieval veins. By playing it completely cold in the first half of the play, he forfeits much of the sympathy that is due Richard in the second. Nevertheless, give or take a bit here and there, the best actor of his time has presented the moviegoer with the best Richard of this generation. In Shakespeare's words: "The king enacts more wonders than a man."

The Ladykillers (Rank; Continental) is another Alec Guinness romp, in some ways even funnier than his 1951 Lavender Hill Mob. It is also a refreshing parody on the current rash of U.S. films, e.g., The Desperate Hours, The Night Holds Terror, in which humble citizens are terrorized by hoodlums.

A little old lady (Katie Johnson) lives in a little old house in London. One soft morning Alec Guinness rings the bell, and she flutters prettily as she shows him the room she has for rent. Guinness oozes all the maniac charm of Jack the Ripper. False upper teeth give him the fleering smile of a criminal mastermind; his askew eyes gleam with demented intelligence; his secondhand clothes and yards-long scarf bespeak the professor of the streets. He has some musical friends, he breathes confidentially. May they drop by occasionally for a recital? The little old lady squeals her pleasure, and in troop the friends--a bull-necked prizefighter, a synthetic major, a knife-carrying thug, a sharp-suited spiv--carrying their instrument cases as though they were submachine guns. Soon the strains of one of Boccherini's 124 quintets for strings are floating through the house, and anyone but Katie Johnson would instantly recognize it as a record. While she sits entranced downstairs, the gang huddles in a second-floor room plotting an epic caper --the theft of -L-60,000 from an armored car--which includes a starring part for their innocent landlady.

The snatch comes off with split-second perfection, and the duped Katie sets out in a taxi to collect the loot that has been hidden in a trunk at King's Cross station. She succeeds, but also gives some hints of her power to complicate the simplest of tasks. After eluding the police net at the station, she discovers that she has left her umbrella behind and demoralizes the gang by going back for it. Then she halts the cab to tongue-lash a costermonger she thinks is abusing a horse. In all the mixup, the money-laden trunk ends up at a police station, and two constables are finally pressed into bringing it home.

By now, the gasping gangsters need to clutch each other for support. Stuffing the money in an empty cello case, refusing Katie's persistent offers of tea and cakes, they take their hysterical leave. A loose strap catches in the door. In wrenching it free, the cello case bursts open, and the doorstep is buried in an ankle-deep drift of banknotes. Shoveling the money back into the house, the frantic badmen realize that the little old lady must be rubbed out. But she stubbornly resists erasure, and the film spirals to its conclusion in macabre twists and turns as the old lady matches wits with the mob. The script by William Rose and the direction by Alexander Mackendrick have the same high polish as the film's stars. Alec Guinness has etched another memorable comic character, but, good as he is, he is topped by the chirrupy stylishness of Katie Johnson as a frail lath of a lady with a heart of oak.

Forever Darling (MGM) takes almost that long to tell its garbled story. It stars TV's Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, but not until the final reels does Lucy get around to taking the pratfalls that are her television specialty.

Desi plays a scientist dedicated to creating a better insecticide. Lucy is his discontented wife, whose major problem seems to be that he won't take her to the movies often enough. Naturally, a marriage as heaven-sent as this one must be rescued at all costs. Its savior turns out to be James Mason, disguised as a guardian angel. Or perhaps the guardian angel is disguised as James Mason; the script is not too clear on this point. Lucy greets the apparition with her customary triple O's of widened eyes and exclamatory mouth, but when she fails in an amorous attempt to wrestle Mason into submission, she reluctantly takes his advice and goes off on a field trip with Desi. Incredibly, this solves all their problems.

* The House of Plantagenet (so called because a French count of Anjou, who sired the line, wore a spring of broom--la plante de genet--in his bonnet) ruled England from 1154 to 1485.

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