Polyglut

Art may be a universal language, but moviegoers who hope to cope with movies on the current U.S. market will also do well to study subtitlese. Foreign films are flooding in, and not everyone understands British, let alone German, French, Italian, Russian--and Art.

The Gordeyev Family (Artkino), a Russian export amplified from a novel (Foma Gordeyev) by Maxim Gorky, is a visual experience that roars across the screen with the rage and razmakh of a flash fire on the steppes. Unfortunately it is also a piece of Marxist propaganda that suggests Premier Khrushchev might profitably send some of his moviemakers to Siberia--to stimulate corn production.

Gordeyev tells the tragic story of a morally sensitive, socially conscious young Russian merchant (Georgy Yepifanstev) of the last century who asks himself: "Is a man born only to make money?" In an episode of shuddery weirdness and God-haunted irony, the sanctimonious serpent (Pavel Tarasov) who serves as the hero's guardian, glassily indifferent to the vast icon of Christ that looms behind him, replies: "Eat or be eaten. That is the law of life." Unable to accept such a law, unable to find a better one, unable to love a good woman (Alia Labetskaya), the hero plunges into dissipation. At the climax the wicked guardian orders the young man certified insane, and at the end the hero stands in the breadline of the poorhouse his own father founded.

Director Donskoi's cartoon-capitalists are often fun to look at, if impossible to take seriously, and even moviegoers who cannot believe in Marxist fairy tales will feel the chthonian power of Donskoi's images. In one, a ballroom filled with swilling businessmen whirls like a carousel as the camera slowly descends to discover that this frivolous world of profit and pleasure is being turned by a great mill wheel, and the wheel itself by the sweat and strength of poor men chained like beasts to an eternal round of labor without value, suffering without sense.

The Green Mare (Zenith-International) is what happens when the French take another whack at Fanny. Like that famously funny film first made by Marcel Pagnol, The Green Mare is a comedy of barnyard humors adapted from a ribald but ruse ironic novel by Marcel Ayme. Regrettably, Director Claude Autant-Lara lacks both Pagnol's touch and Ayme's intensity. The Green Mare ain't what she used to be. Nevertheless she is, as the French say, green--which means, as the Americans say, blue. The plot, for example, involves a Rabelaisian family feud in which the antagonists fight to a finesse and take each other's wives. Best plonk: when a farmer finds a stranger dossing down with his dairymaid, he bawls indignantly, "Be off with you! I can handle the servants without outside help!"

Town Without Pity (Gloriafilm-Mirisch; United Artists), a German-American co-production, starts out as a standard sex shocker, winds up as a routine courtroom thriller. After discreetly observing four drunken G.I.s as they rape a 16-year-old German girl (Christine Kauffman), the moviemakers melodramatically examine the forces that connive at human justice. After 105 minutes, the moviemakers have firmly established two ideas in the spectator's mind: 1) the result of the legal process, even when Kirk Douglas is the leading lawyer, is not necessarily justice; 2) people in small towns can be nasty. Both of these ideas will probably seem novel and stimulating to children under ten, but in well-regulated communities children under ten will not be permitted to see this picture.

Call Me Genius (Continental) is a paintpot farce from Britain that suffers the disadvantage of most comedies about modern art: more often than not, the contemporary art globject is funnier than any imaginable joke about it. Filmed in vibgyorous color, Genius tells the story of a London commuter (Tony Hancock) who one day on the 8:15 cries out in anguish: "Where are we going?" Sternly the man next to him replies: "To Waterloo." Not me, the hero decides. Next day he quits his two-bob job, flings bowler and brolly into the Channel and pops off to Paris, where in no time at all he is van Goghing great guns. He keeps a cow in his studio, sets up as a cafe oracle, founds "the infantile school" of art, and noodles between doodles with an existentialist cutie who murmurs: "Why kill time when you can kill yourself?" The notion may be tempting to patrons of this picture.

From a Roman Balcony (Continental) asks a serious social question: while the Roman classes are living the sweet life, what are the Roman masses doing? The film apparently intends to give a serious social answer: they are living on the verge of starvation. But the way it comes out on the screen, there is darn little starvation and an awful lot of sex. The hero (Jean Sorel) is a young tenement type, slum-dumb but decent, who decides to support his mistress (Valerie Ciangottini) and their child, and goes looking for a job. The employers look him over and say no; the girls look him over and say yes. Finally, in understandable exhaustion, he stops looking for work, starts stealing for a living. The moviemakers apparently approve the hero's decision, apparently on the theory that vice is virtue in a vicious world. Best performer: Actor Sorel, a 24-year-old Frenchman who looks like a Gallic Gregory Peck, ripples his muscles like the serpent of Genesis, and according to his pressagent is about to explode over North America like a megaton of cantharides.

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