The New Pictures

Stalag 17 (Paramount), the 1951 Broadway hit about a Nazi prison camp, is as rowdily entertaining on the screen as it was on the stage. In the play, Authors Edmund Trzcinski and Donald Devan drew on some of their experiences while they were interned with 40,000 other prisoners of war, mostly Russians, Poles and Czechs, in the real Stalag 17 near Krems, Austria. But any similarity between the actual Stalag and its dramatic counterpart is mostly coincidental. In the movie, the fictional events range from suspense (Who is the Nazi spy posing as an American prisoner in Barracks 4?) to out & out slapstick (P.W.s making schnapps out of potato peelings and string, washing socks in a pot of watery soup, lining up at a homemade telescope to gawk at Russian women prisoners taking delousing showers).

Unburdened with any particular sense of the realistic or humane, Stalag 17 is a heartless jape that manages to be both lively and amusing. The sardonic talents of Producer-Director-Co-Scenarist Billy (Sunset Boulevard) Wilder are well tuned to these rather ghoulish goings on. Taking the action out of the barrack confines and into the barbed-wire compound at intervals, he has made a fluent film of the play. He has also got crisp characterizations from his cast. William Holden gives one of his quietly competent performances as a cynical G.I. Otto Preminger and Sig Ruman play comedy Nazis. Don Taylor, Richard Erdman, Harvey Lembeck, Peter Graves and Co-Author Trzcinski himself play P.W.s. Robert Strauss repeats his stage role as Animal, a big, hairy oaf who lumbers around in long winter underwear dreaming out loud about-Betty Grable.

Fast Company (MGM) is a romantic comedy about a horse that conies in a winner only when the jockey sings to it. Also figuring in the cast: a wealthy racehorse owner (Nina Foch) and an aspiring actress (Polly Bergen) with a one-horse stable, both of whom are pursuing a handsome trainer (Howard Keel). With its strained horseplay and plodding screenplay. Fast Company is strictly an also-ran.

The Desert Rats (20th Century-Fox) is a sort of sequel, made by the same studio, to the 1951 movie The Desert Fox, which was criticized in some quarters for glorifying the German Afrika Korps' Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. The new picture is in the nature of an answer to these criticisms. Rommel is again played by James Mason, but the Desert Fox has undergone a change of dramatic color: no longer a generous desert fighter, he is now an arrogant and not very likable character.* The Desert Fox focused on the battle of El Alamein, but The Desert Rats flashes back some 18 months to depict the 1941 siege of Tobruk, where the Nazi blitzkrieg was stopped for the first time. Against this factual background, the scenarists have set a fictional plot about a tough British captain (Richard Burton) with a soft spot in his heart for his alcoholic old ex-schoolteacher (Robert Newton), a private with the Australian 9th Division.

The Desert Rats is at its best when it ditches its contrived plot and concentrates on hard-hitting scenes of desert warfare pieced out with real newsreel shots (e.g., a Commando raid on a Nazi ammunition dump, Rommel's tanks attacking under cover of a sandstorm). Unusual linguistic touch: Actor Mason, who spoke flawless English as Rommel in The Desert Fox, this time affects a rich Teutonic accent.

Mahatma Gandhi-Twentieth Century Prophet (Stanley Neal Productions; United Artists). The still eloquent ghost of Mohandas Gandhi walks through this moving, full-length documentary about India's great leader. Culled from more than 10,000 ft. of film shot over a 37-year period, from Gandhi's early years in South Africa as a successful lawyer to his assassination in New Delhi in 1948, the highlights of his career are knit together with a stirring narration by Quentin Reynolds.

The whole film is a tribute to Gandhi's principles of practical idealism: the satyagraha (soul force, or conquering through love), which was the basis of his resistance campaign against the British in his battle for India's liberation; his insistence on means being commensurate with ends; the mighty weapons the Mahatma (literally, "great-souled") forged for a weaponless people by pitting faith against force.

Best-remembered scenes: the historic 1930 Dandi march, in which he led thousands of Indians in a 200-mile trek to the sea to protest the salt tax; his repeated imprisonments; his fasts, which were effective moral protests that fired India's millions and the world; his death at the hands of a Hindu extremist, which put an ironically violent end to a life dedicated to nonviolence.

The final sequences take on epic proportions as the weapons carrier on which Gandhi's body lies is slowly pulled for five hours by men with ropes through a surging crowd in the streets of New Delhi, while planes shower his bier with rose petals. Then, after his body has been burned on a funeral pyre of bricks and sandalwood sticks, the ashes are scattered on the sacred waters where the Jumna and Ganges meet. One brief, vivid shot shows most of the material possessions that the frail little man in the white loincloth left behind him: sandals and spectacles, a book and a bowl, a tinny dollar watch.

Remains to Be Seen (M-G-M), a movie version of the 1951 Howard Lindsay-Russel Grouse play, is a blend of murder and mirth that succeeds in being neither mysterious nor particularly amusing. The action takes place in a Park Avenue apartment building which houses: a bashful theatrical manager (Van Johnson) who is also an amateur jazz drummer, a sleepwalking band singer (June Allyson). a murdered vice snooper (Stuart Holmes), a homicidal doctor (John Beal). a mysterious lady (Angela Lansbury) who materializes at intervals from a secret door.

Notable sequences: June Allyson jitterbugging. Van Johnson playing the trap drums, June and Van doing a duet of Toot Toot Tootsie, Goodbye.

* For the newest addition to the Rommel legend, see BOOKS.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.