Films

The Matchmaker, based on the Thorton Wilder Broadway smash inspired by an 1842 Viennese comedy taken from the John Oxenford original of 1835, is about the funniest, perkiest picture we've come on in years. While John Michael Hayes' screenplay carries over from the stage show every hoary slapstick device known to man – from scrambling into closets to transvestitism – the maneuvers are so spontaneously panicky that you don't mind one whit. The peppy and near perfect principals include Shirley Booth as the crafty, widowed matchmaker; Shirley MacLaine as the game, impulsive milliner; Paul Ford as the rich tightwad on the make for any sturdy young thing; Tony Perkins as the nutty Yonkers clerk dead set on a one-day fling in New York; and Robert Morse as his jumpy, girl-shy buddy. Joseph Anthony has directed the zany goings-on like he was driving fire horses, and the timing of lines and takes is exquisite. The only disturbing element is the actors' habit (transplanted from the play) of occasionaly addressing a monolog right to the audience: although this charming violation of modern dramatic convention was refreshing on the stage, on the verisimilitudinous screen it's obtrusive and out of whack. But hell, you can't have everything.

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Charging his cameras forward, then ordering them to retreat like Scipio Africanus, shooting high and shooting low, catching Jimmy Stewart's blue eyes in turn bewildered, misty and horrified, eliciting a remarkable performance from beauteous Kim Novak, pixy-pussed Alfred Hitchcock has made an unusually contrived but really great suspense movie in Vertigo. It is consistently mystifying, a little mystic, damned moving in spots and smashes away to an earthquake of a climax. Stewart plays a private dick who takes a job tailing his ex-school chum's wife (Miss Novak), whose psyche is said to be taken over by her dead grandmother. Stewart dogs her, finds that, by golly, she is acting loony – visiting an art gallery, a grave, showing memory lapses, eccentric behavior. The pair meet when Kim leaps into San Francisco Bay; after fishing her out, the shamus takes her to his house and chivalrously dries her clothes. From here on things get curiouser and curiouser: it's obvious that Kim is twisted at least three ways, and Hitchcock wrings some masterful suspense mileage out of close-ups of prosaic items like necklaces and portraits, aided by a spooky musical score and special effects that fairly plunge the audience inside Stewart's mind. Working from the novel From Amongst the Dead, scripters Alec Coppel and Sam Taylor haven't prettied up the finish one iota, so you're left kind of stunned, but appreciative. Like they say, no one will be seated during the last 10 minutes.

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The Confessions of Felix Krull follows Thomas Mann's picaresque novel faithfully except when it adds plot substance that actually improves upon the delightful original. It is the fantastic, featherweight history of a draft-dodging, ladykilling, gem-heisting. German Adonis, fatally attractive to young girls, mature matrons and elderly gentlemen alike, who leaves his native Berlin to pursue Dame Fortune first in Paris then in Lisbon, first as a bellhop then as a counterfeit blueblood. The comedy is effervescent as a glass of Rhine and seltzer; radiates rococo, fin-de-siècle grace. Touchy episodes involving a masochistic lady novelist and a homosexual Scottish nobleman are handled with exquisite taste and true Continental sophistication. The performances (spoken in German; English subtitles) are all exactly right; young, charm-laden Henry Bookholt (nee Horst Buchholz) is Felix to the life and the sort of Living Doll who seems doomed to a Hollywood invite and steady descent into the abyss of fandom and the drooling of teenage werewolves all over. Let's hope not, for the kid is a polished and promising professional who deserves a better break.