Escape

If you happen to glance up at the wall and check your Playmate-of-the-Month tri-color calendar, you'll notice that it's May--reading period time. And if the Metaphysical Poets, the Peace of Westphalia, and Central Kitchen dietetics have furrowed your brow, and you feel you need a final fling at debauchery before the reckoning--try a day of escape at the Boston flicks.

Begin with Attila in the afternoon, when Washington Street is relatively quiet and the Paramount butters your popcorn twice. Attila is an unhappy retouching of the pre-fall Roman days when the Huns manifested their destiny and scourged their way to the Tiber.

Anthony Quinn, complete with Mongolian mustache and a distempered look, stars as the barbarian leader finally turned from the portals of Rome by the Pope and a collection of cross-bearing Christians Bovine Sophia Loren (disgruntled sister of the play-pen emperor) bounces by in a chariot--with that watermelon corpulence which, in this sublimating age, passes for beauty at the box office.

The color is smeared across the screen with a garbage glare, the dialogue is dubbed in from the original Italian, and the small-scale spectacle comes to a limp conclusion as Attila repents and rides back to the Danube with a white cross burning in the sky. But it is escape.

After a cocoanut martini and asparagus stick at Lou's Fruit Juice Bar (near Scollay Square) you can wander down Tremont Street to the Gary for the Young Lions, which is worth the money.

Edward Dmytryk maintains the integrity of Irwin Shaw's World War II novel--tracing the lives of a young German officer and two American G.I.'s (via a number of transcontinental camera switches) to their final encounter on the French countryside in 1945.

A blond Marlon Brando, with an Actor's Studio slur to his German accent, plays "the young, golden god of war"; Montgomery Clift is a tenement Jew persecuted in his barracks; Dean Martin portrays the Broadway high-liner who goodhumoredly admits his own cowardice. And in an example of sophisticated sex, May Britt takes the part of a German commander's homefront spouse--a sort of Berlin community bed-warmer with those "rest your head here, soldier" eyes and a half-mast evening gown leaving only the moral question to a man's imagination.

Aside from a few technical defects, the movie is excellent. The actors are more than competent and the director observes the border line between tragedy and mawkishness. The Young Lions has a simple thing to say--that war hurts everyone and twists the old unchallenged values--and it says it compellingly.

Then there are the Metaphysical Poets.