LOVE OF FOUR COLONELS

Prejudiced as I am toward fantastic plots and Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer, I will start off by admitting that I liked The Love of Four Colonels. However, it is not a very good play. Despite all the curled-lip suavity of Harrison and the charming frivolity of Lilli Palmer, the characters and the situations in the play are horribly stereotyped. The American, the British, the French and the Russian officers billeted together in a small, neutral German province all act like animated caricatures. And when the door of their quarters bursts open by itself on a windless night and Harrison walks in sporting a black cape lined with red velvet on his arm and an evil sneer on his lips there is no question about his supernatural identity. After picking up a blond WAC (Lueen MacGrath) who confides that she is really an angel sent to undo Harrison's deviltries, the group hops off to a nearby castle containing Miss Harrison as the sleeping beauty.

It takes the full first act for this sextet to become acquainted; then, one at a time, the colonels spend the next act trying to seduce the princess with the help of the demon and against the concentrated efforts of the angel. This plot is not bad. But there is a serious dearth of supporting dialogue. The Frenchman is always talking about love, the Russian continually tells the others they lack the proper dialectic approach to life, the Englishman murmurs about duty and his hunting dogs, while the American is largely concerned whether or not his psychiatrist would approve of his actions. Miss McGrath always seems to be waving a pair of wings the propman evidently forgot to paaic on.

Although many of author Peter Batinor's lines are trite, and he resolves nothing in an unsatisfying ending, his take off on Moliere, Shakespeare, and Chekov are quite amusing. The four colonels are allowed to try their amatory luck with Miss Palmer in the enchanted castle, and they are given a choice of any historical period as a setting. This allows Ustinov to inject his parodies.

Of course, during these sketches Miss Palmer is always the heroine. She is delightful mouthing lines modeled after Mclieve, Shakespeare, and Chekov, but she just cannot handle a Brooklynese dialect in the American scene; and frankly, I don't see how anyone could. Harrison, too, has no trouble filling brief roles as a gouty husband, a jester, and an Uncle Vanva, but as an American gangster, he is a very brittle tough guy.