Liv Ullmann Portrays Heroine in ’40 Carats’

Friday June 29 1973

By VlNCENT CANBY

40 CARATS, directed by Milton Katselas; Screenwriter Leonard Gershe, based on Jay Allen’s stage play adapted by a French play by Brillet and Gredy; produced by M.J. Frankovich; director of photography, Charles B. Lang; editor, David Blewitt; music, Micheal Legrand; distributed by Columbia Pictures. Running Time 109 minutes. At Radio City Music Hall, Avenue of the Americas at 50^th Street. This film has been classified as PG.

"40 Carats," which opened yesterday at Radio City Music Hall is Jay Allen's Broadway comedy recycled as R movie, the sort in which, you could put the world's greatest actors and not even mires them. The blandness of the project renders everyone invisible.

Liv Ullmann plays Ann Stanley, a Manhattan real estate agent with a pool-playing daughter of 17 (Deborah Raffle), a madcap mother Binnie Barnes) and a charming ex-husband (Gene Kelly) who acts in TV pilots and coffee commercials. Ann is successful and tranquil but us fulfilled,

On n holiday in Greece, Ann meets personable, presentable Peter Latham (Edward Albert) when her car breaks down in front of a view of the Gulf of Saronikos. Peter, 22, offers her a lift on his motorcycle. Ann refuses, pointing out she is 36. In. stead, he gives her some ouzo, which, strangely, she has never heard of, even though she has aeon junketing around Greece for weeks. One thing leads to another, and Ann and Peter spend an idyllic night together on the beach.

Back in Manhattan, Peter wants to marry Ann. She refuses. She's lied to him, she admits. She's not 36 but 38, Well, actually 40? The way Ann vacillates, you get the idea she sees herself as a female Humbert Humbert. Should she or should she not? Will love triumph? "Don't think of them as years." suggests her charming ex-husband, "but carats. You're a multi careted, blue-white diamond!" As one drama critic said of the play with admiretion, the movie doesn't cop out.

It doesn't do much of anything. It just sits there, like a piece of expensively upholstered furniture. The women wear & lot of fancy gowns and trade wisecracks, only one of which, spoken by that fine comedienne, Nancy Walker, made me laugh. Gene Kelly gives the impression that he might still be as charming as we all remember him in "Singing in the Rain." Edward Albert, who made his debut in "Butterflies Are Free," has n very spruce appearance.

Miss Ullmann, however, it utterly lost. This marvelous actress, the world's most beautiful woman m Bergman's Cries and Whispers,'' looks like a 33-year-old frump, not

a 40-year-old beauty. She is, I suspect, constitutionally in capable of dealing with this sort of nonsense in anything except the rather somber manner of a concerned night nurse in a charity ward. It seems she wants to help but she can't.

Milton Katseias directed - the movie and Leonard Gershe wrote the screenplay. They've succeeded in disguising the fact that it is basically a stage play, but not the fact that the material is hope lessy dumb.