Genet's Balcony is now a movie. Aficianadoes of the author will be horrified at the amount of revision Ben Maddow applied to the play; others, like the good old Boston moralists among them, may just be horrified. The great majority of viewers, however, will probably be simply bored.

To its credit, the film possesses many virtues that the stage Balcony lacked. There is a consistent if somewhat incoherent plot line, and good riot scenes expertly spliced from newsreels dispell, to a degree, the static quality that results from Genet's weak talkiness. The playwright treated his characters as speaking symbols; Maddow converted them into more three-dimensional figures.

Yet the end product is essentially dull. Genet's conception of the entire world as a brothel may have shocked Broadway critics four years ago. But the idea seems pretty tame now. When Shelley Winters explains this Weltanschauung in the movie's fade, for the benefit of the slow-witted, she adds a powerful insult to a rather mild injury. As for sensuous aspects, devotees of this limited segment of cinema art had better stick to Washington Street. There is nothing in The Balcony that could overly disturb a Puritan Sunday picnic.

Peter Falk is the one delight in the cast. He has a strong career ahead as "the man you love to hate." Miss Winters is atrociously miscast as a madam, and the motley assortment of psychotics, prostitutes and morons that round out the acting credits will go better unmentioned.

Director Joseph Strick, who showed a talent for visual satire in The Savage Eye, suffers a distinct falling off in this film. His next project, a film from Nathanael West's Day of the Locust, which has a more familiar setting and theme for him, will probably recoup his prestige.

Let me suggest, in closing, that the distributors remove their "over eighteen" restriction from the film. There is nothing in it that could possibly warp a teen-age mind, and the theatre operators are going to need the extra revenue.