The New Pictures

Can-Can (Suffolk-Cummings; 20th Century-Fox). "Immoral!" blustered Russia's Nikita Khrushchev, after he saw a cabaret scene from the $6,000,000 cinemusical during his visit to Hollywood (TIME, Sept. 28, 1959). Encouraged by Critic Khrushchev's generous prerelease publicity and confident of the picture's substantial "production values"--Frank Sinatra, Shirley MacLaine, Maurice Chevalier, Louis Jourdan, Todd-AO, and some fulgid color photography--Fox decided to release Can-Can as a reserved-seat ($1.50-$3.50) attraction, and expects it to do as well as Gigi did on the same basis. Unhappily, many U.S. moviegoers will discover that Russian standards in these matters do not coincide with their own. Can-Can is not immoral. It is merely dull.

The film only casually resembles the Broadway hit musical of 1953. To begin with, several of the songs are different. Since the Cole Porter score produced no more than two memorable tunes (I Love Paris, It's All Right with Me), Producer Jack Cummings shrewdly decided to ring in some old Porter favorites (You Do Something to Me, It Was Just One of Those Things, Let's Do It). But the old favorites don't make much sense in their new context, and, anyway, they are badly sung. Some of the dances are different, too: the cancan, as it is canned in this picture, is a more sanitary matter than the original Parisian routine--a noisy, sweaty predecessor of the striptease, with a name that is one of the more notorious puns in the French language.

What's more, the characters and the plot have got pretty well snarled up in the camera. Star Sinatra plays a Parisian avocat with the usual lively avocation, but his tired voice and gestures may suggest to moviegoers who have seen his recent films that Sinatrophy is setting in. Star MacLaine, who with better direction has handled herself like an American Kay Kendall, seems little better in this picture than a female Jerry Lewis.

In fact, the only thing really worth seeing is Juliet Prowse, a young South African hoofer who puts some twinkle in the stub-toed choreography. And the only thing really worth hearing is the crack that Frank flips back at Juliet when she whips a redoubtable hip in his direction.

"Don't point," he gasps. "It's rude."

Sink the Bismarck (20th Century-Fox).

The episode of the Bismarck was one of the more peculiar and dramatic sea fights of World War II. On May 21, 1941, the day after the German invasion of Crete, the 45,000-ton battleship Bismarck was reported steaming out of the Kattegat into the North Sea, escorted by the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen. Two days later, the pride of the Nazi navy was sighted speeding south toward the shipping lanes of the open Atlantic. Two British ships of the line engaged her. Bismarck quickly sank H.M.S. Hood, the biggest ship in the British battle fleet, and battered Prince of Wales so badly that she steamed off under a smoke screen.

Could Bismarck reach a safe port in Occupied France? Once there, she could come out as she pleased and cut the vital chain of convoys to the British Isles. In desperation the Royal Navy closed in and for two hours pounded the German giant with everything it had. At last, six days after she was sighted in the Kattegat, Bismarck was sunk, but only by the combined efforts of three battleships, four battle cruisers, two aircraft carriers, eleven cruisers, 19 destroyers and a number of shore-based planes. The German surface fleet never again effectually challenged Britannia's claim to rule the waves.

For the most part the episode is competently and even vividly recounted in this film financed by Fox but produced in England by John Brabourne, the 35-year-old son-in-law of Earl Mountbatten, Britain's Chief of Defense Staff. Exceptions noted: the hero (Kenneth More) is just a gold-striped cliche, and the heroine (Dana Wynter), in view of the urgent need to sink the Bismarck, spends an almost treasonable amount of time trying to float her own office romance.

The Wind Cannot Read (Rank; Warner), but unfortunately the actors in this picture can, and some of the lines they are required to read in the two-hour course of a sudsy story about love and death in wartime India are guaranteed to give even the heartiest glutton for sentimental punishment a proper case of Delhi belly.

He (Dirk Bogarde) is a girlishly handsome lieutenant in British intelligence, and she (Yoko Tani) is a boyishly plain instructor of Japanese. After school the twain meet by an old palace. "Be there a heaven here on earth," he reads soulfully from an inscription, "it is this, it is this, it is this." She giggles. He calls her "Sabby" (short for sabishii, the Japanese word for sad) because of "the lost, lonely, sabishii look in [her] eyes." She giggles. He announces with throbbing voice that she is "the most beautiful woman [he has] ever known." The audience giggles. She bites his ear. "I do love ears." He kisses her nose. "I do love nose."

They keep on like that, and pretty soon they decide to get married. But even after they set up housekeeping, Sabby still looks sabishii, and every time she listens to music she gets a hammering headache--a fact that alarms the hero but seems only natural to the audience, which has for some time been painfully aware of the shriekingly romantic sound track. "I'm awr right, honestry," she assures the hero cutely. But to the experienced moviegoer, who will have assumed from the start that anybody who commits cinemiscegenation is in for a hard time, those headaches are sure symptoms of a brain tumor. "Sabishii," the hero murmurs piteously at her deathbed; "sabishii!" He's so right.

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