The New Pictures

The Long Gray Line (Columbia) is the spirit of West Point as seen through the smiling Irish eyes of Technical Sergeant Marty Maher, for 50 years an Academy athletic trainer. It's a darlin' tribute to Martin Maher (who actually retired nine years ago at 70) and to the Point--although, by the end of the 2 1/4-hour picture, the viewer may feel he has been in for the full four-year treatment.

As played by Tyrone Power, Marty is a fresh greenhorn from Ireland who conies to the Point as a messboy and in time joins the Army, who marries Maureen O'Hara and becomes not only an all-around trainer but confidant and informal adviser to a long gray line of cadets. Since it all began in 1896, Director John Ford gets a chance to toss in the names or quick flashes of the faces of the West Pointers who later became national heroes: MacArthur, Patton, Bradley, Stratemeyer, Wainwright, Van Fleet, and in the scene depicting the first Army-Notre Dame football game of 1913, a fierce young Notre Dame end, Knute Rockne. There is also a glimpse of another of Maher's favorite lads: a blond, pink-faced boy named-Dwight Eisenhower (played by Harry Carey Jr.). ^ There is plenty of competent acting in Gray Line, by such regulars as Power, O'Hara, Donald Crisp and Ward Bond, and a few laughs, too. Mostly, though, there are too many attempts to drive the Point home with a mixture of weeping and corn.

The Wages of Fear (Filmsonor; International Affiliates) opens with a shot of four fat roaches, tied at intervals along a piece of string. They struggle in the dust, their bright legs flailing in desperation, but they cannot escape the fateful thread that links them one to another--links them, perhaps, to some higher meaning? The camera lifts, to stare at a small boy who stares down mindlessly at his wretched playthings. After a while he picks up the string and wanders away.

Shakespeare, when his blackest bile was running, could hardly match this image as a metaphor for existence--"As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport." With this image, with the back of his hand for any sense of purpose or significance in human life and in the world around it, Director Henri-Georges Clouzot (The Raven, Jenny Lamour) introduces a picture that is surely one of the most evil ever made, and yet, curiously, one that uses the approaches of religion. The Wages of Fear seeks out its epiphanies at the cold-blood level of the swamp, where the winding python rears to hiss at the sun, and sinks back blinded but indifferent into slime, where deity is first experienced--as despair.

The four roaches are men, four derelicts on the rot in a Central American oil town. Mario (Yves Montand), a young Corsican with meaty good looks and the gross itch they often portend, ekes out his boredom by cadging bliss at a local refreshment booth (Vera Clouzot). Jo (Charles Vanel), a career thug who fears nothing he can get his hairy hands on and thinks he can get them on everything, hops spiderishly from plot to pointless plot. Luigi (Folco Lulli) is a big warm country boy from Italy, so stupid (as Mario sees him) that he works for a living. Bimba (Peter Van Eyck) is a graduate of a Nazi concentration camp, a German as hard as such an education can make.

All but Bimba ("Get away? Just to change the mosquitoes? No, thanks") are hooked on the same cruel question mark: How to get back to civilization? Suddenly they get a vein-freezing answer. An oil well catches fire. Only an explosion can put it out. The nearest nitroglycerin sits in a shed 300 miles from the blaze--in the very town where the men happen to be. The oil company, a U.S. outfit, offers $2,000 apiece for four good drivers with the guts to truck the soup, over roads that hardly deserve the name, to the scene of the fire.

A dozen desperate men step up. Mario, Luigi, Bimba and another are chosen; Jo is the fifth man, but one murder is all it takes to make him the fourth. Off they go in two trucks, two men to a truck. From that moment forward, the moviegoer is in physical danger from this picture, and should be warned of the fact. Whatever else may be said of it, Wages of Fear is one of the great shockers of all time. The suspense it generates is close to prostrating. Clouzot is not interested in tingling the customer's spine, but rather in giving him the symptoms of a paralytic stroke--a reaction he plainly considers no more than adequate to the condition of human society in the 20th century.

Suspense is, moreover, by no means the only cinematic technique Clouzot can superbly control. He uses his camera with a malevolent dexterity; everything it lights upon, it stings. He cuts from scene to scene by savage slashes and mocking juxtapositions. His frames are cold and harsh, and within them beauty ripples luridly, almost too luridly.

The actors try hard, but Wages of Fear is not a drama of character; Clouzot is much more interested in ideas than in people. At the social level his idea is simple: hate America. His four figures are intended to signify Italy, Germany, and two aspects of the French soul, all sent on a fool's errand to pull U.S. chestnuts out of the fire. The propaganda is mostly vicious and irresponsible, occasionally clearsighted, always clever. U.S. audiences, however, will not be subjected to most of it. Most of the hate-America stuff was hacked out of the original, which ran close to three hours.

Even in its cut version, The Wages of Fear is a film so sophisticated in evil that it is for grown-ups only--the people who have a right to know what is being said, and said with power and conviction, to their detriment in other parts of the world.

Furthermore, the lies and the filth are an essential part of what Clouzot is saying. He is saying, far more forcefully than most of the negativists of modern France, that the world is sick unto death. The disease, as Clouzot diagnoses, is greed; but not greed on the merely personal or human scale; he means the insatiable, original hunger of the amoeba, which is what it eats and eats what it is. Man, he seems to say, has become no better than such slime, and into the slime he rubs the spectator's nose. The evil in all this is that Clouzot does not seem to care what happens to human consciousness and the culture it has labored to create; he takes, instead, a cruel pleasure in all violent dissolutions. Clouzot and his kind are cultural atavisms, arrested in the savage stage described by Ostanes some 2,500 years ago: "Nature rejoices in nature." They have not discovered the two further stages: "Nature subdues nature, nature rules over nature."

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