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There were derisive whistles after the screening of THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, but there were also countering cheers. The Russian delegation applauded. There was considerable discussion as the audience filed out. Most people thought the thankless task of condensing the Dostoyevsky novel had been a fair job, but much of the acting was condemned – Maria Schell’s unanimously.

Britain’s entry, ORDERS TO KILL, which Anthony Asquith directed, proved a sleeper when it opened in London, and I think it may do the same in the US. If Charles Vidor, the American representative on the jury, really thought it offensive to American sensibilities, and was not merely being exploited for publicity purposes, I think his objectivity has become impaired.

ORDERS TO KILL is said to be based on a true incident, that of a US Air Force officer picked by American intelligence to kill a faithless “contact” in Paris during its occupation by the Nazis. The actual murder is most realistically shown. Then the American officer discovers the “contact” was innocent. Perhaps this is a departure from the truth. If so, it is an unnecessary plot fillip that could have been added for anti-American purposes, and Vidor would have been right to protest. Paul Massie has the lead and does well with it, and the cast includes Eddie Albert, Lillian Gish, James Robertson Justice, and Irene Worth, the British stage actress in her screen debut.
All I could think of as I watched Tunisia’s GOHA was that if unlikely entries were excluded from the track there’d be no horse-racing. It is an unblended mixture of whimsy and drama adapted from a Tunisian folk tale about a simple-minded youth who falls in love with the young and beautiful second wife of the town’s wise man. In color.

And all I could think of as I watched West Germany’s DAS WIRTHAUS IM SPESSART (THE INN AT SPESSART) was that I haven’t seen a West German film that said anything since BERLINER BALLADE of ten years ago. This one is a tv-operetta for kiddies, replete with bandits, mysterious forests and a princess who falls for a bandit chief.

Despite good photography and Ingmar Bergman’s direction, Sweden’s THE BRINK OF LIFE (NARA LIVET) is certainly not a successful motion picture. Three women in the maternity ward of a Stockholm hospital recite at enormous length no flashbacks their domestic situations and how and why they got pregnant. One has a miscarriage, one a stillbirth, and the third, unmarried, goes home to mother to have her baby. There is one prolonged scene of the agonies of childbirth so realistic that had I entered the theatre at that moment I would have thought I was looking at a medical film. The woman in that sequence is agonizingly played by Eva Dahibeck.

Pietro Germi collaborated on the story from which he and three other writers did the script of A MAN OF STRAW (L’UOMO DI PAGLIA). Germi also played the title role – that of a husband and father who falls in love with a young girl who, knowing it can’t last, commits suicide. The wife forgives, but the husband is never the same again. Except for the suicide and several other dramaturgical extravagances, the situations are valid and the characterizations true. The young girl is played by Franca Bettoja, who, in addition to great beauty, has restraint and depth. She is certainly the best Italian find in years.

Jerry Wald, Orson Welles, Martin Ritt, Lee Remick and Anthony Franciosa turned up here in connection with the showing of THE LONG, HOT SUMMER and held a press conference “by invitation.” I was not invited. This was the only press conference held during the Festival for which invitations were required. I understand the idea was that of a Mr. Ascarelli of 20th Century-Fox’s Paris office. Some one should tell him the basic facts of press relations.

I was invited by Unifrance to visit Jean Cocteau in his villa at Cap Ferrat. Conversing with Cocteau made us all forget we were to have gone on to Nice for lunch. He thinks theatre admissions are too high and that movie distribution is all wrong. Films are chased out of first-run theatres in Paris before they are played out, he said, simply because new films have been booked in. Cocteau is starting his TESTAMENT OF ORPHEUS, which he refers to as a triptych, in the fall, “For a poet,” said Cocteau, his drawn face aglow, “the cinema is the perfect means of expression.”

The first Russian co-production with India, PARDESI (THE FOREIGNER), proved to be neither good Indian nor good Russian filmmaking. Igor Strigenov plays a 15th century merchant who journeys through India and Asia back to Russia with not very interesting experiences on the way. In Sovcolor.

Juan Bardem’s THE VENGEANCE disappointed everybody. It has a foreword that refers to the Oakies of the early ’30s, but it is far from being even a minor THE GRAPES OF WRATH. It begins like that picture, however, with the return from prison of a migrant farm worker set on revenging himself upon the man whose perjury sent him to jail. The social issues – migrants undercutting local labor, strikes, resistance to technological innovation et al, are suggested but never developed or integrated. Other things are over- melodramatized, e.g., fire suddenly destroying a village’s entire wheat harvest. Raf Vallone and Jorge Mistral do well, and Carmen Sevilla is very beautiful. These assets aren’t enough.

Hungary’s IRON FLOWER (VASVIIAG) is a tear-jerker about a shop girl of the depressed ’30s who leaves her poor but honest lover for the luxury her boss supplies, and then regrets it.

It seemed very curious to me that the press was excluded from the screenings of the 33 films made expressly for television that were competing here in Cannes for the Eurovision Prize. True, this competition was not part of the Cannes Festival, and all the press covering the Cannes Festival could not have been accommodated. But in view of the fact that movies form an ever increasing part of tv fare, something, I think, might have been worked out. Who knows but that in a few years all the movies shown at Cannes will have been made for tv!

Incidentally, Britain’s SWALLOW THE NEXT SOUP won the Eurovision Prize. Two US tv films got honorable mention: THE JOHNNY RATH STORY and Alfred Hitchcock’s MIDNIGHT BATH.

The film prizes of the Cannes Festival itself were received with more resignation than enthusiasm. The Russians, of course, were delighted, but the producers of MON ONCLE were furious. As for the International Critics’ prize – chosen by 12 of the 300 journalists covering the Festival – it was derided by practically all of the other 288.

And I was disappointed, but, after my ninth Cannes Festival, not surprised, that the beautiful performance of the beautiful Elli Lambetti, of Greece, went un-awarded.

THE PRIZEWINNERS

BEST PICTURE: When the Storks Fly Over (USSR)
SPECIAL AWARD: Mon Oncle (France)
BEST ACTRESS: The four actresses in The Brink of Life (Sweden)
BEST ACTOR: Paul Newman in The Long, Hot Summer
BEST DOCUMENTARY: Visages de Bronze (Switzerland) and Goha, (Tunisia)
BEST DIRECTOR: Ingmar Bergman for The Brink of Life
BEST SCENARIO: Newlyweds by Giovanni Mariti (of Italy)
BEST SHORT: The Seine Meets Pails (France) and La Jaconde (France). The jury gave special awards to West Germany’s The Sources of Life and Czechoslovakia’s cartoon How Alan Learned to Fly.

The International Critics’ prize was given to Juan Bardem’s Vengeance.

THE JURY

The “international” jury consisted of four French citizens: Marcel Achard, playwright, scriptwriter, director and president of the jury; Jean de Baroncelli, film critic; Madelaine Robinson, stage and screen actress; and Bernard Buffet, painter – and the following foreigners:

Cesare Zavattini, of Italy; Sergei Youtkevitch, a Soviet director; Tomiko Asabuki, a Japanese film critic; Ladislao Vajda, the Spanish director; Helmut Kautner, the West German director: Buddy Leslie, a British scriptwriter; and Charles Vidor, the US director.

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