Quick Cuts

By JAY COCKS

"BROTHER SUN, SISTER MOON, I seldom see you, seldom hear your tune," warbles Donovan, the unseen balladeer whom Franco Zeffirelli has enlisted to lend a whiff of flower power to this over ripe version of the life of St. Francis of Assisi. Zeffirelli's work looks like a Sun day-school coloring book: everything is glowingly photogenic, including poverty, and leprosy. His St. Francis (Graham Faulkner) is a dewy, light-stepping youth who recruits the young men of Assisi the way a rock singer might round up a band. Their rebellion against the opulent hypocrisy they see in the Roman Catholic Church is to run about in rags, looking radiant. In one scene they all get together in a church and sing a liturgical composition especially provided for the occasion by Donovan.

Shortly after this holy hootenanny, local ecclesiastical authorities begin to be nasty to the Franciscans, killing one of the brothers. St. Francis and his friends promptly go to Rome, where they plead their case before Pope Innocent III (Alec Guinness). The Pope is moved by their presence to ruminate aloud: "In our obsession with original sin, we forget about original grace." Zeffirelli apparently has forgotten about both.

WEDDING IN WHITE has Jeannie (Carol Kane) as something of a simp, and her best friend Dollie (Bonnie Carol Case) something of a scamp with a tal ent for leading men on and turning them off. When a buddy of Jeannie's soldier brother Jimmie (Paul Bradley) makes a play for Dollie late one beery night, Dollie leaves in a huff. He (Doug McGrath) turns to Jeannie, takes her and warns her to stay quiet about it. He and Jimmie return to the army the next day. Jeannie is pregnant, her moth er (Doris Petrie) hysterical, her father (Donald Pleasence) incensed. The father gets his best friend, a grizzled rummy named Sandy (Leo Phillips), to marry Jeannie and give her child a name. The actors are all stringently naturalistic, and Director-Writer William Fruet, setting his somber story in a provincial Canadian town during World War II, is scrupulous about details of place. He also takes care with even the shortest scene, the slightest ges ture, and what power Wedding in White possesses draws from the impact of accumulated detail. Beyond some few grace notes of style, though, Wedding in White is a film without subtlety or surprise. Fruet's script is heavy and strident. This oblique anger, mingled with a certain pitilessness, makes Wedding in White a sort of supercilious soap opera, an attack with no sure target.

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