Directed by Robert Mulligan, The Stalking Moon (1968) is a rough-hewn Western wherein a white woman (Eva Marie Saint) kidnapped long ago by the Apaches, and now rescued, struggles to keep the Indian father of her half-Indian son from taking the boy away.  Helping her in this effort is a retiring army man (Gregory Peck) voluntarily serving as her escort.  The likable action scenes hardly redeem this picture once it starts failing to make sense—perhaps the novel from which it is adapted is more illuminating—and since it too quickly and casually ends.  As it happens, Moon is one of the weakest Westerns of the past few decades.

Cover of The Stalking Moon

The Nutty Professor (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The “inner man” Prof. Julius Kelp releases from himself through chemical means is the rude, unspeakably conceited Buddy Love—not a good inner man.  Julius, a college chemistry teacher, fails to realize this, and never expects Stella (Stella Stevens) to fall for him.  We don’t expect it either; he’s a nutty professor—played with farcical adroitness by Jerry Lewis in the Lewis classic, The Nutty Professor (1963).

However, the movie ends on a dandy note by having Julius and Stella walk off to get married as Stella, unknown to her fiance, bears on her belt two bottles of the weird chemical that turned Julius into masculine Buddy.  Sincerely wanting the qualities of Prof. Kelp, she also wants, I would say,—for Julius—some of the qualities of Buddy Love.

Lewis’s film is a sassy, leisurely, corny delight—with “some scenes that can hold their own with the classic silent comedies” (Pauline Kael).  One such scene contains a tracking shot of people on the street looking astonished at an unseen, very, very cool Buddy.  Another shows, in a flashback, Julius’s darkly, grimly funny parents while goofy baby Julius is in a nearby playpen. . . Stella Stevens fills the bill as the lady-love, and is youthfully beautiful.  Del Moore, as the college president, and Howard Morris, as the professor’s father, are successful as well, hilariously right.

In ’63, The Nutty Professor may have been the best American comedy since Pillow Talk.

Cover via Amazon

If it is a Christian who is baptized (excluding the infants), the baby donkey baptized by children in Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) is a Christian—or, rather, a “Christian.”  He is a “Christian” in the sense of a suffering servant—“an epitome of passive suffering,” says Vernon Young.  He is frightened and scorned and abused by men, while, on the other hand, a girl named Marie (Anne Wiazemsky) loves him as a pet.  But Balthazar, the donkey, is removed from Marie, and Marie—virtually the Mary Magdalene of the film—removes herself from respectable company.  Not only does she love the vile hoodlum Gerard (Francois Lafarge), she also resorts to prostitution.  Balthazar must live with the earthy, earthly reality.  Marie chooses to live with, to embrace, the worldly.

Its flaws keep Au Hasard Balthazar (At Random, Balthazar) from being as powerful as it could be.  All the same, it manages to be one of the good movies of Robert Bresson (unlike those he made in the Seventies), a profound Christian opus acknowledging that there is Christological truth in the natural world.  It also conveys that the sufferer is superior to the sinner, albeit Marie too, after sinning, suffers.

(In French with English subtitles)

Cover of Funny Face

With savvy and imagination Stanley Donen directed the musical, Funny Face (1957), wherein a book store clerk (Audrey Hepburn) is rapidly turned into a fashion model.

Early on, the movie’s appeal is perfectly evident:  Hepburn passably sings a pop masterpiece, “How Long Has This Been Going On?,” by George and Ira Gershwin.  After that, well, it’s strange to see the young Hepburn fall in love with the middle-aged Fred Astaire, and Hepburn’s dancing is sheerly mechanical in the café scene, but the good stuff keeps rolling nonetheless.  Astaire charms us with another top-notch Gershwin song from the Twenties (terpsichore included)—“Let’s Kiss and Make Up.”  And, yes, even though Hepburn’s singing voice is sometimes less than passable, her acting is gracefully decent, properly amusing.