To Die in Madrid runs for about eighty minutes. When it is not being arty or wilfully blind, which is about half the time, it is a very decent movie, the only one I’ve seen in a long time that I wished were longer than it was. Made up of newsreel film shot by various hands, it covers the Spanish Civil War from the elections of 1931, which sent King Alfonso XIII packing, to the entrance into Madrid in 1939, in triumph and amid what the cameras represent as general rejoicing, of a Nationalist army. The movie comes provided with a commentary in cadenced prose read by Sir John Gielgud and Barbara Worth. The lyricism of the prose clashed—unfortunately I thought—with the hardedged view of the war delivered by the newsreel cameras, and Gielgud’s voice particularly, burnished and rich as it is, seemed to me somewhat precious counterpoint to an action in which a lot of people were getting shot up.

But I may be overstating this, and the movie had wonderful things in it, too. The International Brigades coming off the trains in Madrid in cheap caps and badly-made overcoats, carrying cardboard suitcases and forming up in lines to go off and blow up the Middle Ages—the toughness and jauntiness of all that are finely caught. And we see some shots of Unamuno and La Pasionaria—ghosts out of the past: Unamuno then the rector at Salamanca, urbanely mocking the Fascist slogan, “Long Live Death!”; La Pasionaria, the miner’s wife, in her youth a devout Catholic, but now in middle life an abject and fanatic Communist “climbing on a wagonette to scream.” We see André Malraux’s air squadron and General Pavlov’s tanks and the German Condor Legion. We see diplomats running into embassies and Spanish infantrymen dead in the drifted snow. And striding through it all, of course, the Generalissimo himself, thinner, younger, but full of hard self-possession. The newsreel cameras evoke these things with a flat eloquence all their own, an eloquence that could not be managed any other way, I think, and that I found curiously moving, most notably in the shots of the International Brigades called back from the front and disbanded, parading out of Barcelona for the last time, with crowds cheering and children running out to embrace the soldiers.

In calling this movie “wilfully blind,” I do not mean that it is bent on deceiving anybody in the ordinary way of propaganda. On the contrary, it makes an almost touching effort to be balanced and fair and to avoid melodramatics. Where the producers go wrong is in having first deceived themselves, which is certainly more innocent than the propagandist’s way, but about as destructive in the end. They are determined to see the war as a kind of pastoral poem; hence they impose on a tangled and tragic action a set of simple pastoral emotions and an idyllic form that it refuses to receive. The movie opens and closes with shots of a peasant walking through the fields, very arty shots, I might add, made by somebody who obviously thought “The Man with the Hoe” was a great painting. By framing the straight newsreel clips with this kind of poetic photography, the producers try to impose pastoral form and coloration on what their own newsreel cameras have made it hard to think of as a pastoral interlude in history. Thus, the movie shows us dead soldiers and execution squads and the streets of Madrid full of people cheering and saluting the entrance of a Fascist army, and then cuts to a peasant out in the lyrical fields, as though that somehow cancelled out the fanaticism and the mobs and reestablished “the holiness of the heart’s affections.” It doesn’t work, of course, and yet, naive as the method sounds, it has been the way artists have regularly handled the Spanish Civil War. And it is a method that has defeated better artists than any involved in To Die in Madrid. For Whom the Bell Tolls, for instance, which had every reason to be a great novel, fails in exactly this pastoral way, fails to cast a cold eye on its own romanticisms and ends as an exercise in coddled lyric prose. Finally, this movie has too much warm pastoral heart and too little cool satiric head. It takes a few pokes along the way at the fatuity of diplomats, but straining at that gnat, it swallows some very obvious fleas, quoting, for example, with high approval a lot of pronouncements by trumpery generals about the congenital bravery of Spanish males, without ever examining the romanticism of action and involvement, or asking how well the parliamentary idea exports. With the advantage of thirty years’ perspective, it might have raised some of these questions.

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“David Lean’s film of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago “—this style of billing may yet produce “David Lean’s Film of The Ten Commandments by God”—turns out to be a pretty creditable movie, not a great one, I think, though it has moments of that. A tight screenplay by Robert Bolt clears away most of the narrative tangle of Pasternak’s book and scraps almost all of its philosophical conversations, and some of the conversationalists too, notably Uncle Kolia, Zhivago’s mentor. What is left is a love story and a pageant of revolutionary Russia, both of them superior of their kind, certainly many cuts above ordinary screen fare. But a good deal is lost too—all the grain and gnarl have been removed to provide a level, smooth surface—as generally happens when a journalist rewrites a poet’s book. Poets won’t write in straight lines, and journalists don’t know any other kind. The effect in this case is a little like War and Peace abridged by the editors of Holiday.

I don’t want to be flippant about this, and I realize that Pasternak’s book presents terrific difficulties to the adapter, among them Pasternak’s plain ineptitude at narrative. But while the neat, workmanlike screenplay may even be the most intelligent compromise possible, it refuses to take chances, so it gains a sure pageant and parts of a sure love story at the cost of all the book’s poetry and most of its epic quality. The graininess and poetry of Pasternak’s book and hero come from his attachment to ideas from a more spacious age. As a matter of fact, Pasternak’s book manages to repeat most of the philosophic excesses of Russian writing of the great age, the excesses catalogued in D. H. Lawrence’s poem: “The Tolstoyan lot simply asked for extinction:/ Eat me up, dear peasant! So the peasant ate him./ And the Dostoevsky lot wallowed in the thought:/ Let me sin my way to Jesus! So they sinned themselves off the face of the earth./ And the Tchekov lot: I’m too weak and lovable to live! So they went.” But whatever his mistakes, Pasternak has Zhivago triumph over the chaos of history in his time and the smashing-up of his own life by faith in an idea of his own freedom, a faith that touches on everything in his life, including his love of Lara The way the movie chiefly deals with this faith consists in having Zhivago say “I believe in life” from time to time and in making the loudspeakers grind out the “Lara theme” whenever she heaves into sight. Because of its failure to take a chance on Pasternak’s ideas, the great things in this movie come from the photography and the actors.

The photography is quite beautiful, across the whole epic range of demands made on it. It does everything: opulent Moscow interiors, a street-march of workers smashed by horsemen, the trenches in World War I—these with particular economy and power—stands of trees, reaches of mountain, the villa at Yuriatin, a colt running behind the Zhivagos’ sleigh, villages scorched black by the Partisans, and always, it seemed, the snow. Through all of this, and all the temptation it obviously provides to flashy spectacle effects, the cameras remain very finely disciplined, an impression I can best anchor by reporting that the color process used in the movie apparently makes it possible to combine black and white and color, in a way new to me at least, and one that was used just once and most strikingly and at just the right place dramatically.

The actors were a more mixed bag, despite the evident intention of the producers to settle for a smooth ensemble performance, with nobody distractingly great on the one hand, or plainly incompetent on the other. The casting, in other words, took about as many chances as the script did. Omar Sharif as Zhivago comported himself creditably enough. He looked sturdier than I’ve seen him in other outings and seemed a good deal less bent on being exotic or pretty. He wasn’t given much of anything to say, though, that suggested he might have it in him to write great poems or think thoughts much out of the common way, and he didn’t have much luck at aging and even less at growing intellectually in response to experience. Julie Christie as Lara was a couple of shades better than that. She is a lovely girl and a most sensible-looking one, too, and she occasionally catches in her actions—as in the scene where she is ironing linen in an army hospital—the rooted and natural yet romantic quality of Pasternak’s heroine. But when she fails, it is in the direction of an excess of good sense. A second Eve, another Magdalene, all for love and the world well lost—Julie Christie is a lovely girl and can act some, but she isn’t up to that. I don’t know who might be, but I wished the movie had taken a chance here. The one it does take, casting Geraldine Chaplin, in her first movie appearance, as Tonya pays off handsomely indeed. She is an extremely fetching girl, and the scenes she’s involved in sing like nothing else around. You can practically see the dew on this girl. When she gets off a train in Moscow, pleased as punch about her Paris dress and headlong in love in a girl’s way with Zhivago, who is courting her, and then, a World War and a Revolution later, when she has married Zhivago and borne him a child and is about to bear him another, she brings to the movie a life and a humanity it has too little of. The whole first interlude at Tonya’s family’s old villa at Yuriatin struck me as the most beautifully realized thing in the movie. Geraldine Chaplin’s Tonya had a lot to do with this, and so did Ralph Richardson who played Gromeko, her crotchety, Czarist father, and played him to a fare-thee-well, with real imagination and body. Jack MacGowran contributed to these same scenes a characterization of Petya, an old servant of Tonya’s family, that was a model of the daft confusion of a man lost between two worlds, one forever gone, and the other incomprehensibly new. But beyond these people and the one great stretch they create in the movie, the flashes of really imaginative acting are rare. They involve Adrienne Corri in a brief appearance as Lara’s demirep mother, Geoffrey Keen as Zhivago’s medical tutor, and Rita Tushingham, who plays the daughter of Zhivago and Lara in a spare, intense way that captures at least the Zhivago intransigence very strongly. Tom Courtenay makes an honorable try at Pasha, the young revolutionary who hardens later on into General Strelnikov. For the rest, there is a lot of expensive and even accomplished talent on hand, notably Rod Steiger as Komarovsky, the shady lawyer and seducer of Lara, and Alec Guinness as Yevgraf, Zhivago’s mysterious half-brother. The kind of acting that comes from these people is accomplished but standard costume-picture stuff. That’s what Doctor Zhivago comes to in the movies, a superior costume-picture.

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The 10th Victim, with Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress, had some agreeable moments but suffered from the mistake of trying to make romantic comedy out of the 21st century. It’s a fresh approach, you’ll have to admit. The only trouble, as it turns out, is that nobody can believe the 21st century is going to go that way, not even Marcello Mastroianni. He appears to be bored much of the way through this one. The story involves a time when war has been outlawed in the world and violence survives only in a stylized game of love that keeps up some of the old conventions, mainly hunt and kill. The game is played by accomplished professional lovers and killers who enjoy immunity from the law and go up and down in the world at the bidding of an IBM machine in Geneva, doing each other in as stylishly as possible. The rest of the world watches on television and keeps batting averages. Ursula Andress is Caroline Martin, the product of a Hoboken artificial insemination depot and more or less the American champion at the game, an eminence she has won by shooting down a Chinese contender at the New York strip-bar in which she performs. The Chinese had been unwary enough to forget that the silver bra of Caroline Martin might conceal, with devilish occidental ingenuity, two miniature pistols. I don’t profess to know the meaning of all this, but I found myself thinking about it a lot through the winter. At any rate, Caroline Martin goes to Italy to hunt down the champion of those parts, who is Marcello Mastroianni, cleverly disguised as Marcello Polletti. He is hard-up for money because he is supporting an expensive mistress and trying to divorce his wife—there is a running joke through much of the movie involving the idea that though the rest of the world has altered spectacularly, the Roman Rota is still refusing divorces to Italians. It’s the standard Marcello Mastroianni part, a fact not much altered by his having bleached his hair for this time around. Marcello Polletti tries to scare up money by arranging to kill Caroline Martin in front of the cameras of an unscrupulous Italian movie-maker. She has agreed to kill him on a Ming Tea television commercial. There are some amusing glances at an American television crew along the way, but the movie gets more and more diffuse as it goes along, and ends by being tiresome a good part of the time. There are exceedingly long and graphic displays of the Mastroianni bag of tricks as he takes the chill off Ursula Andress. They fall in love, he gets his divorce and sheds his mistress, Elsa Martinelli, who turns in some funny touches. Ursula Andress can’t do comedy, or not very much anyway, but I can see how she might do very handsomely by one kind of big romantic spectacle. She has a lithe, mean, feline quality that is not, alas, parcelled out to most big girls.