Gilded Cage

By J.C.

THE BLUE BIRD

Directed by GEORGE CUKOR Screenplay by HUGH WHITEMORE and ALFRED HAYES

Expensive movies are sometimes made for strange reasons. Quality often has little to do with it. Great amounts of time and huge sums of money are lavished on what Hollywood likes to call "a project" just because a star is "available." The Blue Bird belongs to this category, although tangentially. It is probably the first movie in history made because a country was available.

The country is the Soviet Union. The Blue Bird, as the publicity puts it, "brought the U.S. and the Soviet Union together for the first cinematic coproduction, a distinction accorded to 20th Century-Fox on the American side." The picture is a cultural casualty. The lesson it preaches may have found its origin in the Maurice Maeterlinck play, first performed by the Moscow Art Theater in 1908. An American popular song of somewhat later vintage, however, says it all, and at least as well: "That bird with feathers of blue/ Is waiting for you/ Right in your own/ Backyard."

The movie gives evidence of having been heavily edited, probably in a Cuisinart. A lot of individual shots do not match. Once in a while, someone breaks into song, suggesting that The Blue Bird may once have been a musical. Director George Cukor is one of the most urbane American film makers (Adam's Rib, Holiday), but here both his good taste and characteristic sophistication have lapsed. Elizabeth Taylor (who plays four roles, including Maternal Love), Ava Gardner (Luxury) and Jane Fonda (who, as Night, is decked out in a costume that makes her look like Ming the Merciless) camp it up like movie queens on an overseas promo junket.

Very little of the Soviet Union is on view, save for a few actors badly dubbed, a couple of dancers from the Kirov Bal let and several forests. The most characteristic Russian moment comes in a duet between Will Geer and Mona Washbourne. They portray the deceased grandparents of Tyltyl (Todd Lookinland) and Mytyl (Patsy Kensit), the two intolerable cuties who have been dis patched by Light (one of Miss Taylor's incarnations) to search out the Blue Bird. On their mission, the kids visit the . Veil of Memory, where they find Grand ma and Grandpa snoozing. Soon after awakening and greeting the kids, these two devout peasants sing a little tune about the melancholy restrictions of heaven. It seems that in paradise, Grandma and Grandpa are not permit ted to work, and they are chafing under such unseemly leisure. The kids are sympathetic, but continue their search for the Blue Bird. Grandma and Grandpa then lapse into an impromptu imitation of all prospective audiences for this film by going on the nod again. J.C.

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