The New Pictures

eThe Perfect Furlough (Universal-International) is an almost perfect formula farce. The formula:

(G.I. + id") x (WAC +Sex) = Box Office TNT Scriptwriter Stanley Shapiro and Director Blake Edwards (This Happy Feeling), two of the most promising young masters of movie comedy, have applied the formula with such style that the studio has been able to guarantee the customers exactly 287 (count 'em) laughs without fear of refund. And while the public rolls in the aisles, the professionals should take careful notice. Furlough is a definitive encyclopedia of comic cliche.

The story gets off to a brisk start with Cliche No. 1: an Army outpost in the Arctic, in which 104 G.I.s sit stiff with boredom. Until Cliche No. 2, a gorgeous psychologist (Janet Leigh) of the WAC, recommends a policy of vicarious leave--send one man on a perfect furlough and let the others enjoy themselves thinking about it. The scheme naturally produces Cliche No. 3, a shamelessly corporeal corporal (Tony Curtis), who wins the raffle and is shipped off to spend three weeks in Cliche No. 4, Paris, with Cliche No. 5, a South American screen queen (Linda Cristal). But all at once the gravy train is stopped by Cliche No. 6: a service-nervous Nelly of a P.R. officer (King Donovan). The officer gets scared that the corporal, faced with an objective as tempting as the screen queen, will volunteer for Cliche No. 7, an action that is above and beyond the call of duty. And so he proclaims that the corporal is under Cliche No. 8, house arrest, a condition which, as every collector of cinematic cliches will readily foresee, inevitably leads to No. 9: the scandalous pregnancy of the screen queen, Cliche No. 10 and triumphant conclusion: the corporal's shotgun wedding to the psychologist.

The beauty of Blake Edwards' direction is that it restores to these familiar jokes something of their first fine fervor and surprise. The man obviously loves his material, and he has fired the players with something of his own excitement. Even bored old Keenan Wynn is back at his best. Cast as a great big horrible actors' agent. Actor Wynn slinks about the screen looking like an absurdly prosperous tapir in dark glasses. But when a terrified female pressagent informs him that his big star is pregnant, Wynn reduces his face to a heap of malevolent hamburger, and produces the funniest line in the film: "Miss Baker," he snarls, "I shall hold you personally responsible!"

The Mistress (Daiei; Edward Harrison), one of the finest films the Japanese have made, is a poignant restatement of the timeless truth that in the last analysis a social problem is a moral problem, and a moral problem can only have a religious solution.

Made in 1953 by a Japanese director named Shiro Toyoda, The Mistress starts out like a commonplace discussion of prostitution. The heroine is a girl of poor family, who gets money to support her ailing father by selling herself into concubinage. Her benefactor is a hard-eyed, middle-aged type who represents himself as a widower and a cloth merchant from a nearby town. All goes well enough at first, but soon unpleasant little things begin to come out. The man has a wife and two children. What's more, he is not a merchant at all, but a moneylender, a member of a profession dreaded and despised by the poor. A ruined client of her master attacks the girl, screaming hysterically that the mistress has grown fat and pretty from "sucking our blood."

"God!" she cries. "Is this the only way I can live?" She runs to her father for advice, but the old man is only too willing to let his daughter sacrifice herself to his comfort. She meets a young student, and in his face she sees that there are better things in life than she has known. But he goes abroad to study. Shattered, she finds herself standing alone at the edge of a pond. The water, cool and dark, invites her down. Then a wild goose takes to the air with a thunder of wings. She stares after it, a light waking in her eyes. The soul too is a bird; the soul too is free.

In such a rudimentary story most directors in the West would have seen no more than the usual sentimental folderol about a fallen woman. Even Director Toyoda has committed several sentimental excesses in the Japanese manner--the lover boy, for instance, drifts around with the vague, pathetic expression of a chrysanthemum that has lost its buttonhole. Nevertheless, Toyoda's realism has power and strangeness. He does not see life in the Western way, as a heroic struggle to overcome the forces of nature, but in the Eastern way, as a religious struggle to submit to the forces of nature.

The mood is sensitively developed in the photography and in the playing. Actress Hideko Takamine is lovely as a vase. Actor Eijiro Tono, as the seamy little sugar daddy, gives a performance that is the finest thing in the film. He squats like a monkey, irritably fanning his crotch. He pants hideously as he smears cold cream on his mistress' sensuous young shoulders. And yet somehow he conveys a humbling sense that for all its beastliness, this thing is a man, framed of a substance with all men, made in the image of his Creator.

The Journey (Alby; MGM) takes the road that is rutted with good intentions. The film was apparently planned, in a soft-headed way, as an effort to find a silver lining in the Iron Curtain. As it has turned out, it seems no more than an unfeeling attempt to make a little money. The hero of the story is a soulful Russian major (Yul Brynner) who commands a border garrison during the 1956 Hungarian rebellion and the ensuing slaughter. He detains a busload of foreigners who are trying to leave the country, because he suspects that some of them may really be Hungarians. Almost at once, the major starts to roll his ochi chernye at one of the passengers, an Englishwoman (Deborah Kerr), and offers to become her devoted Slav; but soon he discovers to his displeasure that his pretty little anglichanka is in love with another passenger (Jason Robards Jr.). The major, soulful Russian that he is, swirls his sorrows into a big black cape and goes thundering about the countryside on a big black horse, looking somehow, as Actor Brynner keeps poking about unpleasantly with his riding crop, less and less like a Red Army officer and more and more like a Freudian interpretation of Ivan Skavinsky Skivar. Back in town, the major-hero toasts the heroine in vodka, then chews up the glass as a chaser, superbly indifferent to the blood that dribbles down his chin. Ekh, Tovarish! What does a man care for such scratches when his heart is bleeding--and not only from the wounds of love. The major's heart is bleeding for all those dead Hungarians: "I know my men. They love these people."

How the poor fellow suffers! The camera follows in fascination as he is ravaged by the conflict between love and duty, country and humanity. In the end, with a gesture of completely incredible nobility, the major betrays his country by permitting the refugees to escape ("I would never have been able to sleep again"). Whereupon the scriptwriter suddenly remembers the freedom fighters, who are permitted to provide the shocker in the final scene. They cut the major down from ambush.

The spectator is thus left to conclude that, as far as the tasteless makers of this movie are concerned, the most significant achievement of the Hungarian revolution was the murder of an innocent Russian.

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