224
PARTISAN REVIEW
or less total, as Shaw spent a good many man-hours of his life explicitly
demonstrating. Olivier in his glory has done the opposite; the "clothes
horse" Sphinx is Antony's death set; soldiers bang about in equal de–
gree for the Bard and the religious "mountebank"; Caesar, co-thesis
with Saint Joan and a Don Juan whose sublimity is all of logic, departs
from Egypt so that the curtain can rise on:
"If
it be love, tell me how
much." For such a stunt, perhaps the less meaning the better.
Gigi,
Anita Loos's version of the Colette novel, is about as pleasant
as has been claimed, and for perfectly good reasons, although Audrey
Hepburn is somewhat too overcharged, and relies on too many of the
stereotype poses and gestures of such a part (fresh young girl among
worldly old cynics), to be the best of them. The rest is a matter of good
taste; the story, of the old demi-monde, is slight and nobody
in
the
operation has pretended otherwise; mainly it is an excuse for a fine
Toulouse-Lautrec atmosphere-in a series of scrims rising to French
waltzes and two beautiful Raymond Sovey sets, quite enough, what with
the gaiety of the rompings about and the right old aunt's costumes, to
impose a sense of the higher harmonies for that length of time.
The single-set work-out given by John Van Druten to a few strands
from Christopher Isherwood's
Berlin Stories,
and called from the book's
second paragraph
I Am A Camera,
is both more ambitious and more up
to date as a sexual shock-comedy but lacks any such delicate unity,
leaving Julie Harris, splendid as Sally Bowles, more or less holding the
bag with the German landlady, Olga Fabian. William Prince suggests
less Isherwood than a possible founder of the Harkness Hoot; and
there seems no good reason for Mr. Van Druten to have written in
Sally's mother, who spoils the third act and was way out of ear-shot
in the book. Mainly what has been lost is the artful abstinence from
certain meanings, and from certain connections of events, that marks
the stories; emotional echoes of early Nazism, turned here to righteous
speeches, might appear in the original as ghostly figures in a sanatorium;
and by way of exit line, "like" has been blown up for the box office
into a baffling "love." Sally appears at one point in a marvelous form–
fitting piece of sea-blue underwear.
Eleanor Clark
