Life Is Just a

Bowl of Cherries (Kingsley-lnterna-tional). "The big city!" gasps yet another young Picasso from Pocatello as he stares in gaping amazement at Manhattan's skyline. "I've made it at last!" With his "life's savings" clutched in one hand and his life's work in the other, the young painter-hero of this 24-minute short subject plunges with the valor of ignorance into the talent warren known as Greenwich Village. He rents himself a studio in an alley littered with garbage and decorated with a sign that says: NO TOILET. Then out to the nearest gallery to see who's doing what. Everybody, he discovers, is doing violently chromatic doodles and calling them abstract expressionism. Timidly, he brings out his own slight, representational sketches--mostly of horses. The dealer studies them in obvious horror for a long time. "Marvelous," he says at last. "Horses, aren't they?"

So begins a fresh, charming, witty piece of intellectual slapstick, a two-reel silent spoof of modern painting that is just as funny as Day of the Painter (TIME, Sept. 12) but much more subtle in comment and adroit in technique. The work of a 27-year-old New Yorker named William Kronick, Bowl was filmed at 16 frames a second and is shown at 24, with an arresting result: the picture moves across the screen, as the old silent comedies did, with a tic-quick impetuous energy and innocence that delightfully heighten the fun.

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