The New Pictures

The Earrings of Madame De (Franco-London; Arlan Pictures). Director Max Ophuls has drawn on the long European tradition, as if at a taproot through time, to nourish this dainty, completely artificial floret. It is a literary picture, plainly enough, but it is also not much less than a perfect one, a new cinema classic. Luckily, too, the classic should soon be fairly popular in the U.S., even though it is spoken in French (with English subtitles). Two of its players, Charles Boyer and Danielle Darrieux, are world-famed, and a third, Vittorio De Sica, is an Italian matinee idol who in middle age has become well known as one of the finest directors (Shoeshirte, The Bicycle Thief) now at work.

Secret Sweetener. The earrings of the title, a present from Count de _____ (the family name is never mentioned), a French general of the '90s (Boyer), to his wife (Darrieux), are secretly sold by the lady to the family jeweler in order to cover "certain expenses." Next night at the opera, she pretends to have lost them, and a newspaper reports that they have been stolen. Reading this, the jeweler takes alarm, and hastens with his secret to the count. Amused, the count buys his jewels back, presents them to a mistress he is just discarding, as a sort of sweetener.

The mistress goes on holiday to Constantinople, has a bad night at roulette, sells the earrings. Bought by an Italian diplomat, the widower Baron Donati (De Sica), they travel with him to his new post--at Paris, where in the course of social events he renews acquaintance with his old friend, the count, and is introduced to the countess. Later, while the count is away on maneuvers, the baron executes a few of his own. To the amazement of both parties to the little intrigue, people of the world as they think themselves to be, they fall in love.

Bitter Decline. With Stendhalian suddenness, the mood of the picture breaks. The countess, who has never had to choose between anything more serious than dancing partners, suddenly faces a cruel choice between love and loyalty. The count comes home, sees what has happened, tries hard to calm her. She takes a trip. The baron's letters follow her. She rushes back to throw herself in his arms.

Thereupon the count takes a decisive hand. He tells the baron--who by now has given the earrings to the countess--who it was that gave them to her first. Shocked at her unfeeling duplicity in accepting such a gift, the baron breaks off his suit. The countess goes into a decline, the count into a mounting rage. In the end he challenges the baron to a duel. In rushing to prevent it, the countess has a heart attack and dies.

Languid Infatuation. What Director Ophuls has made of these boudoir trivialities is a veritable Fragonard in motion. Not since Jacques Feyder's Carnival in Flanders has a picture tried so many things at once and brought them all off so well. To begin with, the wonderfully overdone upper-class interiors (designed by Jean d'Eaubonne) are photographed with a languid infatuation that moviegoers who saw La Ronde and Le Plaisir will recognize as characteristically Ophulent. And yet, at the same time, it is clear that Ophuls is unmistakably smiling at his own bad taste.

The smile includes the romantic tragedy he also knows to be an absurdity, and yet he cannot resist spraying it all with an almost cloying odor of Victor Hugo No. 5. But in an instant Ophuls will catch himself up with a comic grimace. There are vignettes of "le hunting,'' of an English youth on the grand tour, of an aged nymph at a ball, that almost break up the show with guffaws. Not to forget some wickedly amusing lines--e.g., "A woman can refuse jewels she hasn't seen," says the count's petite amie, as she hesitates to accept his gift. "But after that, it's heroism."

And there are veins of deeper irony to be mined. The bedtime scene between the society couple--she at her woolgathering, he at his paper, and the beds a shouting mile apart--not only is a pretty parody of all such make-the-point scenes, but actually does make a lot of points about a complex relationship and the kind of society that produced it. Deeper still lies the moment, at the height of tension, when the count, normally a "civilized" man, is so deeply shaken that he tells his wife the truth. "I didn't like your picture of me," he says. "But I tried to look like it so as not to displease you."

Devastating Charm. Boyer as the count is like no Boyer ever seen on the Hollywood screen. Gone are all the mannerisms, the soulful eye-woggling and love-me-please pout. He is the military aristocrat to the last shoe button, going a fair piece down Swann's Way with no illusions--an intelligent, very French, clearly self-knowing performance. As the countess, Darrieux nicely achieves an odd mix of innocence, flirtiness, and neurasthenia, but cannot quite hold her own with the competition.

Nor can even Boyer, in fact, quite hold the stage with De Sica. Although De Sica is 53, Ophuls had the eye to see him as a lover--and a lover of devastating charm he makes. De Sica conveys the sense of a man old enough to know what he really wants of a woman, still young enough to get it, and, most exciting of all, strong enough to say no when he has had enough.

The sum of success in all these parts is a triumph of the whole, and the triumph belongs to Director Ophuls. The hybrid style he has developed, with its exotic fertilizations from a dozen earlier epochs, has at last produced a mature fruit--a sort of artistic pomegranate. The flavor is a shade oversubtle, but most people will be delighted to have tried it.

Valley of the Kings (M-G-M), a kind of shovel opera about archaeologists in Egypt, bears out the well-known Hollywood saying: "You don't have to be good if you're lucky." The picture went into production late in 1953, was completed before Archaeologist Kamal el Malakh hit the headlines with his surprise discovery of the solar boats beside Cheops' pyramid (TIME, June 7). Released now, the film should ride the wave of publicity a fairish distance before it hits box-office bottom.

The picture's plot would perhaps be easier to decipher if patrons were handed pocket models of the Rosetta stone at the door. Ostensibly, the No. 1 digger (Robert Taylor) is out to find the tomb of the first Pharaoh to believe in only one God--the one influenced by the Biblical Joseph. But as the story goes on. the moviegoer gets an uneasy sense that he is being asked to swallow an ideological camel (with Eleanor Parker on top) about the Americans and how they alone shine like good deeds in a naughty world. ("I am afraid," sneers a callow young Menjou-type, obviously a foreigner, "in all the hustle and bustle [in America], the spiritual might have been somewhat neglected.'' True-blue Robert snaps back: "When were you last in the States?")

The foreign fellow is scragged in due time, but not until the screen has been traversed by sandstorms, scorpions, Tuaregs and an epic cooch in which Samia Gamal, the unfrocked Texan-by-marriage, gongs it around pretty effectively.

Actor Taylor, who has learned history the hard way (Quo Vadis, Ivanhoe, Knights of the Round Table), performs like a student fresh out of a cram session, stunned but effective. He even manages to sputter a little Arabic, or words to that effect--"umptu niagda brruschk!"--when the occasion requires. Comes time for the concluding festivities in the Pharaoh's crypt, Taylor seems so tired of it all that he hardly bothers to respond to Actress Parker's subterranean snuggling--a fact which at least spares the moviegoer a sort of petting party in a coffin.

Johnny Dark (Universal) makes only two demands on moviegoers: they are asked to believe that 1) Tony Curtis is an engineering genius, and 2) Piper Laurie is capable of designing a sports car. For the rest, it is a routine, summer-weight Technicolor film that spends most of its time following a road race from the Canadian border to Lower California. Sidney Blackmer and Paul Kelly huff and puff at each other as a pair of old-crony businessmen; Piper Laurie, a talented exponent of the bosom-and-pout school of acting, stamps her foot occasionally and flirts tamely with Villain Don Taylor; Actor Curtis runs into a hero's usual hard luck in the race--he loses his way, cracks an engine block, is clearly out of the running. But to no one's surprise, he wins anyway.

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