New Picture

Once More, With Feeling (Stanley Donen; Columbia). "Wouldn't you like to slip into something loose?" Yul Brynner purrs seductively to his bride. "Yes," Kay Kendall snarls. "A taxi."

So begins one of the most hilarious wedding nights of recent film history. Yul is a terrible-tempered conductor who "uses symphony orchestras the way [other people] use Kleenex." Kay, his mistress of many years, is tired of it all, wants to marry a nice, respectable college president and live like a human being. So she has married Yul so she can get a divorce so the college president will think he is getting an honest woman. But Yul, cad that he is, has no intention of divorce.

He corners her in his den, crushes her in his arms. Suddenly he stares aghast at her shoulder. "Where is it?" "I had it removed." "Our mole?" Kay breaks free, runs around the room with a rose in her teeth. Yul seizes her again. She threatens to scream. He (masterfully): "Go on, scream." She (weakening): "In a minute." He leads her toward the bedroom. "Oh!" she gasps. "I knew this would happen if we got married." She blinks up at him shyly. "Promise me you won't think less of me?" He smirks confidently as she glides away, glides back in a fingertip nightie, just in time to receive an unexpected visitor: the college president.

Too much of the rest of the show, adapted by Playwright Harry Kurnitz from his Broadway farce (TIME, Nov. 3, 1958), is unfortunately not very funny. For one thing, when Actor Brynner sets out to tickle the funnybone, he practically breaks the spectator's arm. For another, Kurnitz' shock gags require the physical presence of the actors for their effect. But in the film version the actors are not actually there, the shock often fails to come through, the laughs often fail to come off. Still, there are a few bits of memorably daffy backchat (Trustee's son: "Mother has a head on her shoulders." Agent who knows the old battle-ax: "Absolutely! I have seen it"). And there is Kay Kendall.

Once More was completed last July, two months before Actress Kendall's death, at 33, of leukemia. Many of her scenes were shot while she had a high fever. Nevertheless, she gives in her last picture what is possibly her funniest film performance. At one point, while Brynner is chasing her around his den, she peers at him through the strings of a harp, and with the merest curl of the upper lip contrives to suggest that she is a caged and ferocious lioness. At another, bedded with a banging hangover, she suddenly gets a mad glint in her eye, yanks the lid off her ice bag, dumps the cubes into a highball, gulps it down, grins wickedly. These and a dozen other bits of business are brought off with delicious wit and a berserk precision of gesture that only Bea Lillie among living comediennes can match. Like Lillie, Kay Kendall was not really so much a comedienne as a clown, and her last picture should leave no doubt in anybody's mind that she was a clown with a touch of genius.

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