Coop's Last

Naked Edge (Pennybaker-Baroda; United Artists), the whodunit that is the late Gary Cooper's last picture, is a waste of a good man. As a buildup, the film's promoters have decreed that large red lights shall flash outside theaters for the last 13 minutes of each performance to warn curiosity-maddened customers that all attempts to storm the box office during that period will be repulsed. But like the Maginot line, the fortifications work only one way; there is no provision to withstand charges from customers already inside the theaters who want to get out.

Quite a few customers may want to. The much-whooped ending is mildly exciting, although predictable and straight out of the parts bin. But the body of the film is tedious and unconvincing. Cooper is supposed to be an American businessman in London whose wife (Deborah Kerr) suspects that he is a murderer. It is all very sinister; Coop gives testimony that convicts a business colleague of murder and then, with a stolen moneybag still not found, begins throwing pound notes around. When his wife asks where the cash came from, he mumbles something about the stock market and adds, as cellos groan ominously in what ought to be called the film's foreground music, "I made a killing."

Hokum accretes; Coop plays shady scenes with an oil-slick partner (Michael Wilding) and a blackmailer (Eric Portman). Every five minutes or so, Actress Kerr's lip trembles; Coop says, "We're going home and talk this thing through," and sure enough, they do. It is a fine, sentimental thing to watch Coop walk across a room, long arms held out from his hips, hands curving in toward invisible six-guns, and it is a useful time killer, while the plot boils on, to speculate about how a director might have made Coop a credible villain.

Alfred Hitchcock, one feels, might have pulled it off, but Director Michael Anderson fails shabbily. An instance is the simple and necessary business of withholding information. When Hitchcock wants to hide the face of a stalking murderer from the camera, he invents some reason--perhaps a half-drawn shade in a rear window. Anderson merely points his lens toward anonymous trouser legs and fires away. No matter how hard the cellists play, this is cheating.

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