Man in Need of a Shave

Anthony Quinn, now 41, is a Hollywood actor who in 20 years before the cameras has seldom been permitted by his employers to create anything more significant than a three days' growth of beard. In 1952 Director Elia Kazan gave Quinn a good part in Viva Zapata!, and he won an Oscar as the year's best supporting actor. In 1954, while on a visit to Italy, Quinn made a memorable meatball of the carnival strongman in Federico Fellini's La Strada, and last year he produced a vivid portrait of a genius as Painter Paul Gauguin in Lust for Life. The critics raved, and everybody seemed to agree that nothing was too good for Actor Quinn. Nevertheless, in his two latest pictures, just about the most significant thing his employers have permitted him to create is a three days' growth of beard.

The Wild Party (Security; United Artists) is a crude thriller that pretends, when it has nothing worse to do, to be a bloody study of juvenile delinquency. The actors all try desperately to talk reet, but somehow it comes out wrong. Actor Quinn is "Big Tom . . . ex-football player, ex-hero, ex-person," who now has nothing to do but "just kind of pleasure myself around." On the night of the wild party he is "coal-mine low," and snarls, "1 gotta tear the world in two."

The tear begins, and for a while, as Big Tom cuts recklessly into the lives of the hero and heroine, the story has some of the horrible fascination of the old Saw Situation of silent days. One of Big Tom's evil associates (Jay Robinson), a sort of Ivy League Peter Lorre, picks up a rich girl (Carol Ohmart) and her naval escort (Arthur Franz) in a fancy bar and offers to take them slumming where the piano is progressive. Big Tom is there, and he dances with the girl in a forward way. "That's how I operate." he murmurs, breathing hard, "two times normal and twice as fast." They all drive away in Tom's car, and for most of the next hour Actor Quinn has nothing to do but knock the hero down and push the heroine over.

Man from Del Rio (Robert L. Jacks; United Artists) is a conventional western with a more or less conventional moral, viz., if you try to run a gunman out of town when the wrist of your gun hand is broken, be sure the scriptwriter is on your side. In this one, Actor Quinn plays a gunman who arrives in a one-saloon town and, in a remarkably short time, ventilates three bad men. The good citizens promptly name him sheriff, presumably on the theory that it is better to have a bad sheriff who can shoot fast than a good one who can't. It is a tribute to Quinn's inventiveness that by scratching, bumbling, slobbering and gazing dumbly out of his unshaven face, he manages to make a conventional pasteboard character seem like a real human slob.

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