New Wavelet

Movies, now more than 50 years old, are going through a major change of life.

When television tore into the movie market, most of the big Hollywood studios dissolved into a clutter of independent producers and corporate stars. But Hollywood's economic revolution soon developed into a worldwide revolution of another kind. In France and Poland, a band of gifted and dedicated young moviemakers, inspired by the example of Italy's neo-realists and Sweden's Ingmar Bergman, plunged into a daring and promising renovation of the art of film. Working on tiny budgets without benefit of studio facilities or well-known actors, the men of the Nouvelle Vague (TIME, Nov. 16) in a single year produced at least three pictures--Black Orpheus, The 400 Blows, Hiroshima, Mon Amour--of rare originality and power. And to the amazement of the moneymen, the European public took a shine to the new ideas. Six of the films released last year by the New Wave were solid hits on the Continent--and three of the six have already piled up good grosses in U.S. art houses.

Last week, as a roundabout result of these international developments, a lively New Wavelet of cinematic creativity was rolling across the U.S. and gathering momentum by the moment. The beatnik film, Pull My Daisy, which runs only 29 minutes but seems considerably longer, is a sort of celluloid-muffled Howl. Financed (for $20,000) by a couple of Manhattan brokers, it features a few well-known beat bards (Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky) in a "free improvisation" on a scene from an unproduced play by Jack (On the Road) Kerouac. The beatniks stumble around a pad on Manhattan's Lower East Side, giggle hysterically, wrestle, and mumble "poetry." Even so, Daisy is funnier than most sick jokes, and, considering the subject, it is going over big, particularly in college towns.

Other items: The Savage Eye, a vastly more important piece of cinema that has won several big prizes in Europe, takes a disturbing, 65-minute plunge in the garbage-choked stream of a neurotic consciousness. The script, written in raw, hard-sell poetry ("The slime of loveless love, masturbation by proxy") by Ben (The Asphalt Jungle} Maddow, traces a year in the life and mind of a young divorcee (Barbara Baxley), "living on bourbon, cottage cheese and alimony" in Los Angeles. "Sick of the touch of human skin," she lives alone at first, lolls in beauty shops, dawdles in poker palaces, waits for "a disk jockey to pick her number out of a phone book" and give her "a life supply of dentifrice." Later she lets her human feelings leak away in pointless sexual episodes, finally tries to run away from her dilemma at reckless speed in a secondhand car. She smashes up, but in the shadow of death she finds at last "the courage to say no to nothingness" and yes to life. Produced in Los Angeles for about $65,000. put up by the people who worked in the film, The Savage Eye is photographed with Hogarthian ferocity, edited with skill and biting irony by Director Sidney (The Quiet One) Meyers. Unfortunately the moviemakers spend practically all their time assailing the eye and the mind, almost never take time to touch the heart.

Jazz on a Summer's Day, an 85-minute visit to the Newport Jazz Festival of 1959, is almost as brilliant in technique and a lot more fun for the average moviegoer. Filmed in DeLuxe color. Jazz cost $210,000 to make, was shot by six cameramen in four days and directed by Photographer Bert Stern, who had never made a movie before. In a jam session of images, the picture presents a remarkably broad anthology of red-hot and gully-low, real cool and way out. And with the help of telescopic lenses, the customer gets so close to some of the world's most solid senders--Thelonius Monk, Gerry Mulligan, Dinah Washington, Big Maybelle, Mahalia Jackson, Louis Armstrong--that even a square from anywhere will probably get with it.

Private Property, produced by two bright young men from Broadway--Leslie (Marriage-Go-Round) Stevens, 36. and Stanley Colbert, 32--is cinematically the least interesting of the new offerings, but in some other respects the most important of the four. By a shrewd stroke of commercial imagination, Director Stevens and Producer Colbert have carried the New Wave crashing into the heart of Hollywood. Basically, Property is a straight, commercial movie, a slight variation on the sex-and-shock formula that keeps the grind houses full in every major city. The plot: A smooth young switchblade artist (Corey Allen) moves in on a sex-starved housewife (Kate Manx, wife of Director Stevens), gets her all excited, and then turns her over to a drooling but impotent buddy. Hollywood was impressed by Stevens' glossy script, sure directorial skill, revolutionary methods. He shot the pic ture in ten days at his own home in the Hollywood hills. Furthermore, the cine-magnates were flabbergasted by Stevens' budget: a mere $60,000 for a picture that will probably gross more than $1,000,000.

Last week 20th Century-Fox executives were happily whipping up a contract for Stevens and Colbert to make at least five pictures on a total investment of $1,000,000. Said Stevens : "I wouldn't touch a big Hollywood picture with a barge pole.

When millions are involved, you have to satisfy the bankers. I want to satisfy my self. I don't need money now. I want free dom, and in the movies you can only have freedom on a low budget." Art-house managers seem willing to take a plunge in the New Wave, and Holly wood has at last been forced to recognize that the art houses, whose numbers, ac cording to Variety, have multiplied from twelve to 550 since the end of World War II, are now a strong factor in the U.S. cinema economy. Says Stevens: "To day a $100,000 picture cannot possibly do worse than break even." If nothing else, the men of the New Wave have proved that a good American movie can be made for much less than $100,000. And with more general and skill ful use of new techniques and tools --high-speed films that eliminate the need for batteries of studio lights, portable and powerful light sources that use ordinary house current, portable and inexpensive movie cameras and sound systems -- costs will undoubtedly sink lower still. Says one low-budget moviemaker: "This is the best thing that has happened to the movies in 40 years. There will always be a place for the multimilliondollar, mass-audience movie. But now for the first time in Amer ica, there are enough people who take movies seriously to support a school of serious moviemakers. We may be seeing the start of a cinema renaissance."

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