Richard Quine - Operation Mad Ball (1957)

Synopsis:

In this frantic service comedy, a group of bored-to-tears American GI's stationed at a medical facility in France would like nothing more than to have a big party to let off steam -- except for the possibility of having a big party with some of the nurses they work with. However, it seems that the nurses are officers and the GI's are enlisted men, which means the Army forbids them to socialize, and Capt. Locke (Ernie Kovacs), the camp's Commanding Officer, is not a man to bend the rules. But Private Hogan (Jack Lemmon) is not the sort of guy to let the rules get in the way of a good time, and with the help of Yancy Skibo (Mickey Rooney), a sergeant with a talent for scaring up needed supplies, and Mme. LaFour (Jeanne Manet), a local hotel manager with a soft spot for making money off American servicemen, Hogan hatches a plan to make his dream a reality. Hogan's lady friend, Lt. Betty Bixby (Kathryn Grant), isn't quite as convinced as her beau on the potential success of this scheme. Operation Mad Ball was the first directorial effort from former actor Richard Quine, and afforded Jack Lemmon his first starring role; Blake Edwards also contributed to the screenplay.



AllMovie Review:

Operation Mad Ball is a middling armed services farce with a cast that deserves better. While Operation deserves credit for elevating the gifted farceur Jack Lemmon into leading player status, the fact is that Operation needs Lemmon much more than Lemmon needs Operation. The screenplay is one of those heavily plotted affairs in which something is happening every minute and yet nothing very much really happens. It's all improbable, if not impossible, and incredibly contrived. In the right hands, none of this has to matter; if the dialogue is snappy and peppy and the characters have spark and originality, the audience will be willing to put up with mechanical plotting. Unfortunately, Operation's dialogue too often falls flat, and the characters, while quirky, really come alive only because of the excellent cast. Lemmon, of course, is aces, pouring boundless energy and imagination into a role that requires it but doesn't deserve it. Ernie Kovacs practically pushes anyone onscreen with him out of the picture, and Mickey Rooney gives one of his better mid-career performances here. Richard Quine's direction is obvious, but he does keep things moving, which is crucial. Catch Operation Mad Ball for its cast.













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Richard Quine - How to Murder Your Wife (1965)

Jack Lemmon is a happily unmarried man with all the creature comforts one could desire including a wonderful butler who takes care of all his material needs. At a bachelor party for a friend, Lemmon gets drunk and wakes up married to an Italian woman who speaks nearly no English. It totally alters his life. He even changes the cartoon he writes and shifts it from a secret agent to a household comedy. When he begins to have trouble with all of these changes he starts to plot that at least his secret agent cartoon will return to order and plans, in his daily comic strip, killing his wife. When she disappears, the cartoons are used as evidence at his trial.





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Richard Quine - Bell Book and Candle (1958)

A Witch in Love; 'Bell, Book and Candle' at Fine Arts, Odeon

THE magic in "Bell, Book and Candle," which opened at the Fine Arts and Odeon Theatres on Christmas, is not so much black as chromatic. It's the color that's bewitching in this film.

Actually, its story of a young lady who possesses some supernatural power, which she uses to inveigle a gentleman into falling in love with her, is neither as novel nor engaging as you might expect it to be. Pretty young ladies in movies are bewitching gaga fellows all the time with enticements and devices that are magic, so fas as the audience can tell. So the gimmick of John van Druten's stage play, which has been used as the basis for this film — the gimmick of a woman endowed with witchcraft—is really rather silly and banal.

And, as Daniel Taradash has reduced it in a screen play directed by Richard Quine, it is not distinguished by any consistant witchary or bounce.

However, Julian Blaustein's production of this mildly supernatural romance is as sleek and pictorially entrancing as any romance we've looked at this year. From the atelier of the heroine, who is a dealer in primitive art, to a smoky night club in Greenwich Village, where the local sorceresses and their apprentices play, it is vividly visual an dsuggestive.

For the wonderful things it does with color, imposed upon design, we can thank the art director, Cary Odell; the special color consultant, Eliot Elisoforn, who is setting real styles in color movies, and the cameraman, James Wong Howe, Together, these craftsmen of the visual have done things that hypnotize the eye.

To give you an example, they suggest how things look to the witch's cat by saturating camera-distorted images in a deep melancholy blue. And what they have done with New York street scenes at dawn and twilight is necromancy for fair.

Thanks to them, we would say Kim Novak, as the slinky and seductive young lady who possesses the powers of a witch, looks a lot more convincing than she acts.

James Stewart is himself, highly lacquered, as the publisher whom she hooks, and Jack Lemmon, as a warlock, or brother-witch, is as airy as a puffball. Elsa Lanchester and Hermione Gingold friskily play a couple of old harpies, and Ernie Kovacs portrays a fuzzy author as if he were trying to put Maxim Gorky into the show.

"Bell, Book and Candle," like the stage play, is only so-so sorcery, but it comes pretty close to magic so far as its color values are concerned.
Bosely Crowther, NY Times, December 27, 1958







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