Operation Mad Ball is a kind of landlocked Mister Roberts that has to do with a U.S. Army Medical Center set up outside a liberated French town in 1945. Staff members include a clutch of whistle-bait nurses and a sharp, shrewd gang of enlisted men, one of whom is gaga over a certain Florence Nightingale but can't make out because she's an officer. To give the kid a hand, his buddies arrange an off-limits ball ("It's going to be a mad ball, man!") to provide the soft lights and hard drinks calculated to get the lady's hair down. Preparations for the ball grow frantic, the guest list is stretched to the breaking point, and the brass smell a rat. Much of the infectious fun is supplied by Jack Lemmon who turns in a deliciously droll performance as a private. The heavy is played by Ernie Kovacs, an intelligence captain slated for the Senate once the war is over, and looking for all the world like a khaki-clad Mephisto -- all sneers, smiles and smirks -- as he snuffles through the footage monomaniacally attempting to foul up the proceedings. The day is ultimately saved by Mickey Rooney as a master sergeant who speaks only in jazzed-up rhyming couplets as he dashes back and forth thinking out a solution to the men's woes. Backing them up is a fat cast of atypical GIs, all of whom make Bilko's bunch look like pink-cheeked ROTC cadets. It's a happy, screwball film with a lot of belly laughs.
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Peyton Place brings just enough of Grace Metalious' succès de scandale to the screen to give non-readers of the book a fairish idea of what all the shouting was about. But those who have read the tome (Playboy After Hours, Dec. 1956) will again spot the disparity of license granted the book and film media: because the flick is sugar-coated for the censors, the author's behind-the-scenes probings into the sexual peccadilloes of a small New England town come through on the screen only in a summary by the town doctor rather than in the incisiveness of straight exposition. To be sure, there are episodes loaded with shock: a stepfather's rape of his daughter, a suicide, a mother's confession of her daughter's illegitimacy, a murder trial -- and these scenes are handled well. But in the main, this is a lukewarm version of the red-hot book and might better have been dubbed Pallid Place than Peyton Place. The acting -- by Lana Turner, Betty Field, Arthur Kennedy and Lloyd Nolan -- is competent throughout, and the shots of rural New England with the local citizenry employed as authentic color are superior, so you might just give this a whirl if there's nothing great around.
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Italy sends us Cabiria, a must-see follow-up by the director and star of last year's notable La Strada -- Federico Fellini and Giulietta Masina; this time the impish waif is an impish fille de joie trudging along the streets of Rome and proving the indestructibility of the human spirit ... Mile. Brigitte Bardot gnashes her thighs all over the place in a fluffy Cinemascopic yarn called And God Created Woman, and if you live in a state without censorship, you will have the unalloyed pleasure of seeing the bracing Brigitte stretched out nude in an opening scene, certainly worth the price of admission.
