The Moviegoer

Real as a gob of spit, as antiseptically moral as the Ma Perkins program, the surprisingly adequate film version of "The Hucksters" gives us jug-eared, musk-exuding Clark Gable, mounting a full-tilt attack on Inane Advertising; the picture is at the same time, however, the unconscious exemplar of much that is awry in the cinema industry.

Its main flaws are, actually, those of the novel. The main difference is that while Frederic Wakeman had a Message, and to the detriment of his novel, spelled it out in overly large letters for Book-of-the-Month Club buyers, the moviemakers have felt impelled almost to club his point home to any cretin who wanders into the theater. Despite this fact, you will find yourself in sympathy with the bright young man who makes his way in the "game" with a front compounded of sincere ties and a fetching spiel. You will find it not at all difficult to share his disgust on realizing that his life, and the programs the country listens to, are shaped by the whims of a tyrant-sponsor. This churl is delineated expertly, if a touch too silkily, by Sidney Greenstreet. And Adolph Menjou's sodden-drunk recital of the way he got ahead by giving a friend and associate the shaft, is strong, frightening acting. In fact, for a movie presumably depending on the title and the names Kerr and Gable for its impact, the casting is excellent and expensive all down the line.

But the picture does have bad moments--most of them coming in the unfolding of the love story, which was frail stuff in the novel, too. The hero's adulterous affair, which was originally a succession of mildly immoral, quite dull interludes, has been scrubbed shiny clean by the conversion of the gal into an impeccably, impossibly genteel widow woman. Gable contrives to melt this Pallas Athena, Deborah Kerr, by fondling her tots and growling to her when they are not around, "A weekend in the country with separate rooms and sailboats on the water--that's for us, huh, honey? That's for us..." And again, instead of allowing the disgusted hero to renounce the game and dissolve quietly into the night, the scriptwriters have added a scene in which the forthright fellow gives the sponsor-boor his comeuppance with a pitcher of water.

You are likely, though, to get a bang from the scene, as you will from the whole flicker if you assay it not only as a vehicle produced to make a good point, but also to make a lot of money.