Films

Danny Kaye, as cornetist Red Nichols, sings, mugs, imitates Louis Armstrong's anguished vocal sounds and carries a load of guilt and grief in various parts of The Five Pennies. His anxieties stem from his blaming himself for his daughter's having contracted polio. He drops out of music and gets a wartime shipyard job so he can be around to cheer the kid up and help her walk again. The picture, which ends with his musical comeback, is a fairly factual bio of the Dixieland rebel who, with trombonist Miff Mole, developed far-out, highly integrated small-combo jazz in the mid-Twenties. The musical interludes -- and thanks be there are plenty of 'em -- are rousing-wild. They include Kaye and Satchmo doing The Saints, contrapuntal singing by Satchmo, Kaye and moppet Susan Gordon (as Nichols' daughter, age 6) and Red's famous Battle Hymn. Tootling and percussing in Red's Five Pennies are Ray Anthony as Jimmy Dorsey, Shelly Manne as Dave Tough, Bobby Troup as (continued on page 20) Arthur Schutt and Ray Daly as Glenn Miller. Bob Crosby has an amusing bit as a bandleading megaphoney. Kaye's his usual supple, comfortable self, and Satchmo is fantastic. Fun, like they say, for all the family.

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Love Is My Profession is a study of the pleasures and payoffs of prostitution. Brigitte Bardot, a willful streetwalker, good-natured about lending her body to whoever wants to make use of it, gets an Elektral crush on her lawyer, aging Jean Gabin, after he springs her on a robbery-and-assault rap. Gabin is rich, aggressive and, it turns out, unable to savor l'amour with his wife. He sets B.B. up in a lush flat, and, being a rather broad-minded masochist, OKs her congress with other men. But two people are annoyed by this arrangement: Gabin's good-looking but worn spouse (Edwige Feuillere) and Brigitte's vindictive boyfriend (Franco Interlenghi). Gabin's impotence is overcome on Brigitte's couch and, to frustrate the boyfriend, who is beginning to bug both of them, he hides Brigitte in an even ritzier pad and keeps her locked in. Unfortunately, he can't cure, all by himself, her sensual appetites, and there tragedy lies. You may already have seen the still of Brigitte's bloody corpse (Playboy, Peekaboo Brigitte, November '58). The psychologically intriguing screenplay is from Georges Simenon's In Case of Emergency. Direction by Claude Autant-Lara is subtle and penetrating, with Gabin, Interlenghi and Miss Feuillere superb in their performances. In the best vehicle Brigitte has had to date, she attempts a complex characterization with uneven success. The censor appears to have used his axe rather than scissors on this one, but what's left is most provocative.

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The switch in A Hole in the Head, a bright, noisy comedy with meaty characterizations and great lines, is that precocious, red-haired little boy Eddie Hodges has more sense than his old man, Frank Sinatra. Frank, a promoter-type widower who companionably plays gin with the kid at night, has suavity, wit and snazzy suits, but he's about to lose the Miami hotel he owns for non-payment of bills. His only solution is to put the arm, for the nth time, on his preachy, totally square older brother, Edward G. Robinson. Because Frank has invented an illness for the kid, Ed and his fluttery, good-natured wife, Thelma Ritter, buzz down to check. Their self-righteous reactions to the hip life Frank leads and the child's environment are mighty droll. Aghast, they try to fix Sinatra up with a moneyed widow. But the widow turns out to be Eleanor Parker, who's good competition for Frank's unsteady steady, bongo-banging, night-swimming, cukie broad, Carolyn Jones. Guilt-ridden about the monetary deals involved in his courting the widow, Frank, in a last gesture of independence, calls on old buddy Keenan Wynn to back him in a promotional scheme, and disaster follows. Director-producer Frank Capra keeps things moving at a bubbly, frantic clip and all hands (particularly Robinson and Miss Jones) do nobly by the homely, funny and erratic bits set down by Arnold Schulman, who also wrote the Broadway play. Former Playmate Joyce Nizzari has a speaking part as one of Wynn's secretaries (Playboy, Slick Chick Flick Pick, May '59), and she projects.

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Summer in north Finland brings out the sprinter in both sexes, judging from the impulsive goings-on in The Milkmaid. A sneery farm foreman chases after the pretty, bouncy, hard-working miss of the title, and when she's free of him she races through the fields pursued by a clean-cut, flaxen-haired artist. Of course, the races she has with the artist end in a tie, and are followed by grass-grabbing scenes with facial contortions reminiscent of Ecstasy. Finally the artist and the foreman have a fistic showdown and, vacation over, the artist moves southward, leaving the milkmaid a scrapbook of sketches. The picture has a couple of plusses: honest, bare-boned direction and unself-conscious camerawork, and the milkmaid (Anneli Sauli), admiringly shot from every possible angle, is worth going into training for.

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There isn't too much we can add to the plaudits already copped by The Diary of Anne Frank in all its incarnations. Its cast is superlative, including Joseph Schildkraut and Gusti Huber from the stage version, along with Lou Jacobi, Shelley Winters, Ed Wynn and newcomer Millie Perkins in the title role. George Stevens reaffirms his position as one of the finest directors working today, and the screenplay, by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, delineates the final years of the Franks and Van Daans in an Amsterdam attic with all the emotional impact that the story had within the proscenium arch. An indication of the film's power: after scenes of genocidal persecution, its ending on a note of hope for the good in all men seems in no way contrived or illogical. To Hollywood, for making Diary, a well-deserved tip of the chapeau.

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Clippety-clippety-clunk go the censor's scissors through The Third Sex, a sensational picture about die Homosexualitat, denuded of most sensation. What's left is a peculiar and somewhat naive story, based in part on court records: a middle-class German mother (Paula Wessely) is worried about the homosexual leanings of her 18-year-old son (Christian Wolff). He pals around with an intense, poetic chap (Gunther Theil) who looks at him very warmly and reads him his novel. Worse, the son also appears fascinated by a wily sophisticate (Friedrich Joloff) who plays twittery music on an electronic instrument, collects art and boys, and also stages wrestling bouts in his salon. After consulting a doctor, his mother fixes Klaus up with a girl (Ingrid Stenn), which is just what the doctor ordered. But then, turned over to the cops by the furious homo, the mother's sent up the river for procuring. Some odd types parade through the picture, directed by Veit Harlan from Felix Lutzkendorf's screenplay, which, one presumes, was originally written to entertain all types of people except censors. Of course, whether censors are people or not is as moot a point as you're liable to come across in a month of Blue Sundays.