The New Pictures

Trapeze (Hecht-Lancaster; United Artists). Less than a century after Phineas Taylor Barnum raised it high, the Big Top is folding all over the U.S. (TIME, May 28), and the Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze may soon pass into history with the flagpole sitter and the Human Fly. Trapeze is an attempt by Producer-Actor Burt Lancaster--who got his start in show business as an acrobat--to give the sons of the leotard what may prove to be their last fling in the big time.

Like every circus worthy of the name, Trapeze offers plenty of exciting sideshows, and the favorite distraction is sure to be Gina Lollobrigida, who keeps drifting across the screen in pretty, scant costumes. Gina is a lowly trampolinist who wants to fly high, and she keeps trying to climb the rigging with the "catcher" (Lancaster) in the aerial act, but Burt will not give her a tumble. He does all his catching on the high bar with Tony Curtis, and he refuses to let a woman come between them. But Gina keeps pitching those curves, and pretty soon both Burt and Tony are grabbing at everything in sight.

The script, in short, is just a barrel of soggy tanbark, but there are plenty of comic spangles scattered through it--e.g., the midget who is wakened every morning by the kiss of a giraffe, and the snake merchant who spends the better part of the picture polishing a lady python.

Invitation to the Dance (MGM) is the first feature-length ballet film that ever came out of Hollywood. It is also one of the few times since the movies found voice that the moviegoer has been offered a picture without dialogue. Indeed, the absence of what passes for human speech in most movie scripts will probably attract more customers to this show than the presence of well-known dancers (Igor Youskevitch, Tamara Toumanova, Claire Sombert, Diana Adams, Belita, Carol Haney, Tommy Rail), who do not get much chance to strut their stuff.

The trouble seems to be that Hollywood just cannot bring itself to put the art before the coarse. Gene Kelly spent more than three years in the production of this picture, and he had been thinking about it for a decade before shooting started. He devised the choreography, commissioned the music, directed the dancers and the camera, and he dances a leading part in each of the picture's three episodes. Yet when it came to a showdown with his studio bosses, Showman Kelly was forced to play for the quick cash and let the enduring credit go. In the first of his danced playlets, however, Kelly manages to reach something not too far from the Diaghilevel, and that one effort should persuade the ballet enthusiast as well as the movie fan to accept his invitation to the dance.

Circus is a simple, romantic ballet, set to some suitable music by France's Jacques Ibert, laid in a village square of placardized baroque, and dressed in costumes that suggest the saltimbanques of Picasso. It is pretty and sweet, but not too sweet. As the play begins, Pierrot (Kelly) appears in his baggy white costume to open the program of a teatro circo, an Italian traveling circus. With the stilted gestures of mimetic tradition, he tells of his hopeless love for the leading lady of the troupe (Sombert), hopeless because she loves the daring aerialist (Youskevitch).

The curtain closes on the prologue, and acrobats, like an avalanche of oranges, come tumbling at the camera, with jugglers and parti-colored harlequins who set the screen to flailing like a crazy quilt in a squall. Enter the mime again, this time with bells on his ankles, wrists and cap, to do a little foot-about that is charmingly reminiscent of the lady in the nursery rhyme who has music wherever she goes, and then a gay bacchanal as the villagers join in.

Night falls, and Pierrot sits alone in the deserted marketplace. The folded tents of the merchants stand tall and sad as cypresses. The lady and her lover appear, and dance together a sensuous adagio. Sombert is lovely in this lyric piece, and Youskevitch is starkly splendid in his solo dance. The clown, mad with jealousy, climbs to the wire. He will prove, though he dies, that he is a man, and die he does. He lies broken in his lady's scarlet mantle, like a white bird in a pool of blood.

From almost any point of view, this ballet seems as good as many (and rather better than some) in the standard repertory. Indeed, M-G-M apparently thought it was too good for the general public. Kelly's next effort, a terpsy-turvy take-off on Schnitzler's La Ronde--in which a daisy chain of lovers passes a bracelet (it was syphilis in the original) from one to another until it gets back where it started from--is mostly not much better than the brothel sequence in any other Technicolor musical. The third offering is a parody of Scheherazade, in which Kelly, as a Sinbad in a sailor suit, does an ever-so-cute little dance with some animated cartoon figures.

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