The New Pictures

Facts of Life (H-L-P; United Artists) suggests that if the commercial comedians would only stop trying so hard to make people laugh, some of them might be funny. In this picture Bob Hope and Lucille Ball, sometime major magnates of the TV laugh industry, set out to make a quiet little country-club comedy--partly for the mass audience, but partly also for their own pleasure in reading good material again after all those years in the yak pastures. To their considerable amazement, they have produced the funniest U.S. film since The Apartment--a quick, slick, slyly satirical and sometimes wonderfully nutty comedy of middle-class manners and middle-aged morals.

Written, produced and directed by Norman Panama and Melvin Frank, Facts of Life inquires with wicked glee into the nature of the tie that binds men and women in holy wedlock. Is it love? No, it is inertia; most married people remain faithful to each other because it is just too much trouble to cheat.

The theory is illustrated with the case of two middle-aged suburbanites--one male (Hope), one female (Ball), each happily married to somebody else--who have known and mildly disliked each other for years. Then, accidentally, they find themselves in Acapulco for a two-week vacation, alone together and falling in love. They fight it off, swim it off, laugh it off, in the end settle for a nice, safe, neuter idyl that is both hilarious and painful to watch.

Back home, the nonlovers realize suddenly how much they have missed, make a date one night to meet in a nearby town. Just as Hope is about to leave home, his wife reminds him that he has promised to take his son to a Cub Scout meeting. Furious, he drags the boy off, sits through an interminable report on Indian smoke signals, arrives for the date two hours late--too late to do anything but tool over to a drive-in theater. They settle down for some heavy necking, only to find that they are parked beside their mutual laundryman, who is peering at them curiously. Terrified, they duck their heads, scramble for the keys, bump heads, accidentally hit the horn--which sticks. Two minutes later, the whole drive-in audience is straining angrily to get a glare at them as they hastily back out. So it goes, at tryst after assignation after rendezvous, until finally in sheer exhaustion both parties decide that fidelity is the best policy.

As a piece of comic craftsmanship, the show is almost faultless. Everybody knows that Hope and Ball are formidable clowns; this picture, in which they seldom make a funny face, should remind the public that they are skillful actors too. By definition, the film is formula farce, but the formulas are shuffled so deftly and so often that they always seem fresh and interesting, and the rare dead stretches of the picture are rescued with good sharp gags. (When the lovers take their first nervous ride to a motel, the silence is interrupted by a blare of radio music. The selection: This Is My First Affair.) What is more, quite a few of the lines are charged with an energy of misanthropy that punctures the drowsy air of a popcorn palace like a gunshot. (She: "It's funny. You know people so long, and you never really get to know the little things." He: "Not if you're lucky.") Such shots are by no means random. Panama and Frank carry a popgun, but it is loaded for boor. In the course of the show, they take plenty of skin off the child-man and the mother-wife who get married and, in psychological fact, live incestuously ever after. But their biggest broadsides are reserved for the average amorous ignoramus who would claim a seduction (if he ever had one to claim) on his income-tax return.

Circle of Deception (20th Century-Fox) is an ingenious spy thriller that raises subtle and uncomfortable questions of political morality. If a citizen betrays his country, the crime is called treason and the penalty, in wartime, is death. But what if a country betrays one of its citizens? What crime has been committed against what law? Who is to assess and who to pay what penalty?

The situation: D-day minus, say, 20. The Gestapo breaks a British spy ring in the west of France, captures the unit's code, radios London for "instructions." The British, on to the German game, see a golden opportunity to feed the enemy spurious plans for the forthcoming invasion. "What we have to do," says a cold-eyed intelligence captain (Harry Andrews), "is to let them get a man of ours and break him, a man who doesn't know he is carrying false information. If he believes his story, the Germans will believe it too."

The captain's colleagues protest, but none can suggest an adequate alternative to his plan. Says the captain: "It's one man's life against thousands." Grimly, the others consent, and several days later the captain parachutes into the area a sensitive, emotional, mildly unstable young agent (Bradford Dillman), who carries in his mind instructions for an imminent large-scale rising of the Maquis against German garrisons in the area. By radio, the British con the Germans into capturing him, and events proceed as planned. He is tortured. He chooses suicide rather than confession--but the capsule concealed in his hollow tooth contains no cyanide. Horrified to find himself still alive, he cracks and tells the Germans everything. Whereupon the Germans reinforce the area with troops they might better have used elsewhere. The young agent, rescued by the Maquis, is forced to live in the belief that when the chips were down he betrayed his country. Unable to face his conscience or his countrymen. he slips away to North Africa after the war and goes quietly to the dogs.

At moments, Circle is peculiarly square. Hero Dillman, who looks like a clothes dummy in a department-store college shop, just cannot make reasonable people believe he is really standing up to those nasty studio Nazis. Suzy Parker, the famous photographer's model who plays his girl friend, spends most of the picture staring stupefied at the baggy old lieutenant's uniform her part requires, and no wonder; she looks like a flamingo in a horse blanket. On the other hand, Nigel Balchin's script would pass the strictest muster; Jack (The Captain's Table) Lee's direction has edge and drive; and as the spymaster, Actor Andrews drifts through the story like a huge and sinister iceberg--a masterly personification of national self-interest. With this image on the screen, not even a sappy ending can blink the awkward and timely issue this picture so entertainingly presents: If nations are not bound by the laws of men, why should men be bound by the laws of nations?

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