New Picture

This Angry Age (De Laurentiis; Columbia). "There were many children in the plain," wrote Marguerite Duras in The Sea Wall (TIME, March 16, 1953), the brutally beautiful French novel about Indo-China on which this film is based. "They were a kind of calamity . . . They came each year, by periodical tides, by crops. They were everywhere, perched in the trees, on the backs of buffaloes . . . in the mud, looking for the dwarf crabs of the rice fields, [and] they were always followed by packs of stray dogs, whose . . . main nourishment was their excrement . . . They died in such numbers that they were no longer mourned . . . They simply returned to the earth like wild mangoes falling. They died of cholera . . . Some drowned in the river. Others died of sunstroke or were blinded by the sun. Others were filled with the same worms that devoured the stray dogs and died, suffocated."

But of all the children of the plain the most miserable were the widow Dufresne (Jo Van Fleet) and her two grown children (Anthony Perkins, Silvana Mangano), because they knew that they were miserable. The picture tells how the little family of French pioneers fought the sun and the sea and the jungle but were slowly devoured by the usual worms of lust and greed and indolence. And in the family's fall is mutely, eloquently epitomized the larger collapse of the French regime beneath what used to be called the white man's burden.

Ma and Pa Dufresne came to Indo-China as schoolteachers. When Pa died, Ma was left with two small children to support, and she took a job playing piano in a cafe. For ten long years she pounded the keys and squeezed the centimes until she had enough money to get a farm--and then bought a plot of lowland that the sea invaded every summer, carrying off the harvest before it could be gathered. Indomitable, Ma built a wall of mangrove logs to keep the sea away, but a storm came and broke the wall in a single night, and broke Ma too. She kept on talking of the things she was going to do ("We'll have a show place here some day!"), but after that she never did them, and neither did her children, Joseph and Suzanne.

Hour after hour Joseph lay on his bed, listening to jazz records on his rusty phonograph and sweating his youth away in voluptuous fantasies of the city, where he would "be myself, be free, be cruel and be rich." But whenever he threatened to break out of the web, his mother would bind him tight again with a pernicious tissue of threats. "The day you leave here," she would sob self-pityingly, "I'm going to die!" As for Suzanne, she cleaned up the worms that fell from the diseased roof into the beds, into the food, and sat staring down the road, wondering if some day her prince would come.

One day he did. He was a stupid young man (Nehemiah Persoff) from the city, but he was rich. He offered Suzanne a new phonograph if she would let him watch her take a shower, and a diamond if she would spend a weekend with him in the city. "I guarantee I won't touch you," he assured her, gasping with excitement. Suzanne contemptuously accepted his diamond but declined payment, and Joseph stirred worms into his coffee. But Ma led the suitor on, in hopes he would lend her money. When he didn't, Joseph ran him off the place with a shotgun, and then ran off himself--to the city.

The rest of the picture describes, in too much detail, how. the city hastened the deterioration of the family. Unfortunately, the moviemakers felt obliged to provide a happy ending; but it could easily have been worse, and so could Silvana Mangano. Jo Van Fleet is first-rate, and Tony Perkins, a skillful young man who has gained his craft so easily that he may be in danger of losing his art, does the best work of his brief screen career. Chief credit belongs to the director, France's Rene Clement (Forbidden Games, Gervaise). He has done some of the vulgar things that the bankers believe the mass audience requires, but he has also been honestly concerned to preserve the passionate spirit of the book, the sinister genius of the place.

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