The New Pictures

Carnival Story (King Brothers; RKO Radio) is a complicated, full-color variation on the terse theme stated in an old ditty:

Like a dollar goes from hand to hand, A woman goes from man to man, (She keeps travelin') . . .

Joe Mallon (Steve Cochran), a pitchman for a U.S. carnival touring West Germany, catches a fraulein named Willie (Anne Baxter) picking his pocket and hustles her off the midway. He kisses her. "I've been kissed before," Willie moans with pleasure when he lets her go, "but never--uhhhhh!" Willie "tries to resist" --being, as the synopsis explains, "an attractive and intelligent girl who is simply down on her luck in the ruins of postwar Germany." But Joe "arouses her beyond her powers of resistance . . . and like so many others before her," she is carried off to the conqueror's chariot in the darkened merry-go-round.

During the rest of the picture, Wfllie and Joe rack up enough mileage in that chariot to make Carnival Story a sort of Indianapolis classic of its kind. At first, Willie gets a job in the cook tent, but then the high-diver (Lyle Bettger) gives her a spot in his act. One day he asks her to marry him. Joe does not mind: all he wants is his free ticket on the merry-go-round. Disgusted, Willie weds the high-diver, but Joe soon has her right back where he wants her. Before it all ends, Willie is left in the arms of a LIFE photographer (George Nader)--a nice, steady young fellow of the vine-covered-cottage type, according to the script.

Carnival Story is pretty sure to be accused of being a dirty tease, but for that reason alone, will probably clean up at the box office. Cochran is convincing as a tough lover boy, and Lyle Bettger is clear, persuasive and simple as the husband. Anne Baxter, as she writhes, spits and yowls, gives a horribly fascinating portrayal which should assure her succession to the Bette Davis roles.

Elephant Walk (Paramount), though hardly a work of art, is an astonishingly neat feat of manufacture. It was begun in Ceylon during February of last year, and the film unit was flown back to Hollywood to do some final "spotting." In mid-March, before work could be finished, Star Vivien Leigh had a serious nervous breakdown and could not complete the picture.

It looked as if Elephant, which had already cost Paramount more than $1,000,000, had turned out to be a gigantic white elephant. If Actress Leigh's scenes were dropped, what was left? Just barely enough, Producer Irving Asher decided, to provide background for a second shooting of the film on a Hollywood sound stage. Elizabeth Taylor was borrowed from M-G-M to take Vivien's place, and Elephant Walk, new version, was in the cans by mid-May. Total cost: close to $3,000,000.

High marks for cinema technique go to Producer Asher, Director William (Portrait of Jennie) Dieterle, and especially to all concerned in the art direction, film editing, special effects and process photography. Their craftsmanship has almost succeeded in blending a Technicolored crazy quilt of Hollywood foregrounds and Ceylonese backgrounds into a single mood.

Where the seams show, however, the quilt is crazy indeed. When Elizabeth Taylor and Dana Andrews take a canter, for example, the background rushes by as if they were flat-racing. And at several points there are sharp cuts in the film, one of them so drastic that the audience almost loses track of the story. This is the more important because the story, based on a novel by Robert Standish, is more complex and subtle than most of those told on the screen.

An enormously rich young planter (Peter Finch) takes his bride, a middle-class English girl (Elizabeth Taylor), back home to his tea plantation in Ceylon. Their house is an Oriental palace with all the Occidental conveniences, but the bride does not like the life in it. Her husband and his assistants work hard all week, and on weekends have wild parties and play polo on bicycles in the main hall. All. that is, except one (Dana Andrews), the second in command, who prefers to play sonatas.

More and more estranged from her husband, the young woman is more and more drawn to his assistant. The logical conclusion, however, is forestalled by a plague of cholera, during which the husband comes to understand himself and the wife to forgive him. In the end, the house and what it stands for--the embodied tyranny of the husband's father--are destroyed by a herd of elephants, whose way to water it has long debarred.

The relations between the main characters are finely graded, and call on the best powers of the actors to express. Dana Andrews responds with his strongest performance in several years. Peter Finch not only fits without a wrinkle into the planter's character but moves through the outlandish manse with such negligent assurance that the audience is convinced that he grew up in it. Elizabeth Taylor, though very beautiful, is too young and inexperienced an actress to fill a role designed for Vivien Leigh.

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