FREDA BRUCE LOCKHART ON FILMS T WO small but exquisite French

films I saw this week more than hold their own in the company of the Hollywood-International super-colossal epic Genghis Khan ("A", Leicester Square).
l'he formula for the huge-screen, monster-cast rainbowcoloured epic has hardened as it expanded into something between a circus and a fairy story. Subject and setting are usually found in the remotest possible time and place in history.
Expects prepare the screenplay (in this case TV dramatist Berkely Mather) into which goes a good deal of erudite research which does not always emerge in the finished article. A distinguished case is engaged and hurled into the melee which becomes a contest of survival of the fittest.
Artistic casualties are often heavy; physical ones seem all too likely. especially among the horses in the hideous last battle on a plain somewhere on the Road to Samarkand.
My own history is not erudite enough to judge the processes by which Genghis Khan (Omar Sherif), the Mongol chief who has terrorised nearly 1,000 years of history, becomes a gentle prince or woodcutter's son and enlightened emperor forging tribes of Manchurians and Merkits into the United Nations of China.
Certainly Mr. Sharif—who was so splendid in "Lawrence of Arabia", made a magnificent Balkan revolutionary idealist in "The Yellow Rolls Royce" and will soon be seen as "Dr. Zhivago"—is the leading artistic casualty.
His handsome face masked by layers of pasty make-up, his naturally gentle style is swamped by herds of men and horses. Stephen Boyd. with all his experience of Hollywood Roman nonsense ("Ben 'Nur", "The Fall of the Roman Empire") cornea off a little better as Jamuga, the villain.
But the artistic survivors are without doubt Robert Morley as the Chinese Emperor (in a most beautiful brocade coat) and James Mason as one of his Court officials.
I caught up with a horse of another kind after years of trying to find Crin Blanc by Albert Lamorisse who directed that enchanting French movie "The Red Balloon". Crin Blanc appears in The Wild Stallion ("U", Academy Cinema One).
The wild white horse of the Camargue, pursued by three determined Frenchmen on horseback, is caught and tamed (but not broken) by a little boy wearing what look like long combinations in which he can wade or be dragged through the marshes.
The beauty of the photography belongs to the never-never world and the story of the friendship between the little boy and the wild horse make it the most exquisite child-animal story filmed.
It would be naif to suppose that it was achieved with no distress to the horses. But compared with the terrifying savagery of even a domestic dog fight, the encounter here between two wild horses is as elegant as a court dance.
This net-to-be-missed picture, with hardly any dialogue and lasting only 40 minutes, is showing with The Luck of Ginger Coffey.
At the Academy Cinema Club, two doors along, is a fascinating museum piece said to be Robert Bresson's first film: Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne. It is interesting as evidence of a most unlikely partnership between the intensely Catholic Bresson and the late poet Jean Cocteau, who wrote the dialogue.