Unlikely Comedies

Not on Your Life offers a mordant answer to the question: Can a hearse driver find happiness with an executioner's daughter? This black comedy from Spain thus uses the weapons of farce to mount a small, stinging attack against capital punishment, though Director Luis Berlanga too often evokes laughter and stifles it at the same time.

Hero Nino Manfredi is a cheerful, sensitive young chap who chauffeurs cadavers around Madrid. One day he meets the public executioner's daughter (Emma Penella), a deep-bosomed spinster whose marriage opportunities have been blighted by her father's profession. Already bound by the facts of death, the daughter and the hearse driver soon begin to share the facts of life as well. When the girl becomes pregnant, the couple get married--at a macabre economy-sized ceremony in a busy chapel where the flowers, candlelight and carpeting are spirited away as they say "I do."

The newly weds start a search for living quarters, but the only apartments available are for civil servants. And the only job available belongs to the girl's old man, who longs to retire and turn his garroting clamps over to younger, stronger hands. Impossible, says the driver: "I can't kill a fly." Nonsense, says his father-in-law: "You've always worked with dead people."

Director Berlanga, to his immense credit, works exclusively with live ones. His characters are sharply observed, warmly played. When Manfredi is summoned at last to finish off a condemned man on the sunny island of Majorca, he takes his wife along for their honeymoon. The gay holidays end with a jolt in a bleak prison courtyard where uniformed guards are forced to drag the reluctant executioner and his victim to ward the hour of judgment. The comment is strong but disappointingly literal, for Life loses ground as a first-rank satire when it stops kidding its message and starts preaching it.

White Voices, touted in publicity as an Italian-style Tom Jones, is a ribald comedy based on one long, indelicate joke about the once-celebrated castrati, the eunuch sopranos of Italy. Gelded at an early age to preserve the pitch and "whiteness" of their voices, the castrati enlivened Europe's leading salons and opera stages for most of the 17th and 18th centuries.

In richly varied, stylishly photographed settings that effuse the florid flavor of the period, the writing-directing team of Festa Campanile and Massimo Franciosa brings to the foreground an impoverished layabout named Meo (Paolo Ferrari). Meo bungles his way into the Vatican vocal conservatory that separates the boys from the men, bribes the surgeon not to operate on him, but somehow manages to retain a passable falsetto. Later favored by the nobility, the false capon cuckolds his patrons. He reveals his secret to one elegant lady (Anouk Aimee) while he helps her undress. Another (Barbara Steele) learns the truth when the two snuggle into a barrel used as a duck blind. A third (Sandra Milo) gets the news under a cape while performing at a fashionable impromptu. Her husband applauds.

Though White Voices sounds titillating in summary, its lustfulness, weakened by fast and frequent fadeouts, is mostly suggestiveness. The rest of the humor is fetid stuff, performed with more energy than art, ranging from gags about chamber pots to winking asides about transvestitism as a career. Voices may excite curiosity among gentlemen with a taste for camp. Jones boys will find better things to do.

Quick, Before It Melts explores the comic possibilities of sex in Antarctica and coaxes forth little more than a frozen smile. Against rear-projection views of a place that resembles McMurdo Sound, Director Delbert Mann belabors all the hoariest tricks of his trade. Melts has crazy scientists, sex-starved Navymen, a penguin that delivers radiograms, a seal given to voyeurism, and quips that must have been packed away since Admiral Byrd first visited the place. "We're having a heat wave--darned near up to zero!"

Among those stranded on this outing are Broadway Comedian Robert Morse as a fidgety magazine reporter assigned to Operation Deep Freeze, and George Maharis as the lecherous photographer who helps thaw out a pair of playthings flown into the base for publicity purposes. One is a blonde (Janine Gray), one a brunette (Anjanette Comer), and that is the easiest way to tell them apart. It doesn't really matter. As a showcase of young talent, Melts appears to be the year's best bet for instant anonymity.

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