The Winners at Cannes

Cannes, the fun-and-gamiest of film festivals, ended last week with Italy's La Dolce Vita as the unanimous choice for the Golden Palm first prize. Starring Anita Ekberg and dealing aimlessly with the sensual corruption of modern titled Italians--from the Via Veneto's sophisticated sodomists to the industrialist's young daughter whose idea of let's-go-slumming is to make love in the chambers of a prostitute--Director Federico Fellini's film has already provoked a church furor in Italy. In Cannes last week, it also set the tone of the whole festival. In reversal of tradition, there was little obvious sex among the spectators and publicity-minded starlets this year, but there was so much on the screen that, before the competition was very far along, Cannes' filmpalace had been labeled The Erotica.

The two-week Mille Miglia of celluloid was about equally divided between films that used sex for art and films that used sex for sensation. Items:

P: Italy's The Adventure embarrassed some spectators after sensuous Monica Vitti had rolled in unmown hay with her leading man. It left them spellbound when the fellow enjoyed a tart on a hotel divan while Mistress Monica twitched with loneliness in her bed upstairs. Roberto Rossellini and the professional cinema crowd hailed the film as "masterful" and "ten years ahead of its time."

P: Japan's Kagi, in many ways the high event of the festival, concerned an aging lecher whose strategy is to restore his virility by making himself jealous. According to that prescription, he virtually thrusts his daughter's fiance into the arms of his own young wife (Machiko Kyo, whose musky, lotus-eyed sensuality was muffled in Rashomon). The young man is hardly more attentive to her than the camera, which pans up slowly on her nude body from feet to calves to knees to thighs to a lap dissolve. Topping that, the film contains what is probably the most uproarious juxtaposition of images in the history of cinema. As the rapt Cannes audience watched the young fiances clinch, the bedroom suddenly faded, giving way to a railroad switchyard. In closeup two train cars coupled, while locomotive pistons made background noises. The audience howled. The Japanese producers, caught with an arty touch that misfired, indignantly wondered what had happened.

P: Belgium's If the Wind Frightens You shocked some of the most jaded judges in Cannes. Under Emile Degelin's direction, its principals never so much as touch each other, but in the end no doubt remains that the affair, begun in the North Sea dunes, will be consummated that summer--between a pretty, blonde, 18-year-old girl and her 21-year-old brother. Sniffed a bored Van Johnson: "Amateur night."

P: Mexico's The Young One, made by Director Luis Bunuel, somewhat unoriginally followed the progress of a game warden (Zachary Scott) as he successfully arouses the sexual appetite of a 13-year-old girl.

P: Sweden's The Virgin Spring, which already caused something of a scandal in Stockholm, proved to be so honestly made that the audience gasped in terror but made no more attempt than Ingmar Bergman's camera to look away as three goat herds rape a rich farmer's 15-year-old daughter. Bergman's film won the approval of nearly every critic in Cannes.

P: Greece's Never on Sunday (directed by American Expatriate Jules Dassin) presented a happy, fun-loving prostitute, who always keeps her Sundays free for her own lovers and for her regular visits to productions of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. A prudish but captivated tourist (Dassin) tries to be her American Pygmalion. But the only thing she has in common with the statue Galatea may be nudity. Steadily funny and awash with pagan sex, the comedy won an award for Actress Melina Mercouri, was at its best when all the tarts of Piraeus go on strike against their landlords, drop their mattresses out of bedroom windows onto the heads of American sailors.

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