The New Pictures

The Country Girl (Perlberg-Seaton; Paramount) is the screen version--and a great improvement--of Clifford Odets ambiguous 1950 play about a middle-aged Broadway has-been and the two people who drag him up the comeback trail. It's a tough trail for the audience, too, but the view is well worth the trip.

Oldtime Musicomedy Star Frank Elgin (Bing Crosby) has courted defeat for nearly a decade by mixing self-pity and the bottle. He is, as his wife says, a "cunning drunkard," and he camouflages his self-destructive path with martyrdom on one hand and penitence on the other. His main trouble is that there are two people who believe in him: his wife Georgie (Grace Kelly), who is too strong for her husband and too weak for her own good, and Broadway Director Bernie Dodd (William Holden), who has to fight both Elgins to give Frank a try at the lead in a new play.

Audiences who remember Bing Crosby's competent straight acting in Little Boy Lost (TIME, Oct. 5) are sure to enjoy watching him plunge into some new acting depths in Country Girl. And 50-year-old Bing, who sings a few pretty good songs by Ira Gershwin and Harold Arlen, possibly gets his biggest kicks playing the aging actor who has to wear special hair pieces to give him a youthful look for the play-within-the-play.

Actress Kelly, who has achieved some fame as a ladylike beauty, also, gets her pretty teeth into a meaty acting part. She is a fine Georgie as she pads about her fourth-floor walkup, thin-lipped and pale, trying grimly to needle a weak-willed husband back to his self-respect. As the relentless, bullying director, Oscar-winning Actor Holden is as sharp as ever: a first-rate professional.

The Heart of the Matter (Associated Artists) is a failure that is more distinguished than all but a few of the year's most successful films. Based on Graham Greene's 1948 novel, it is certain to outrage anyone who admired the skill and the love with which the novelist threaded his theology through the mazes of a human heart. In the film, the Roman Catholic hero's suicide, the event that phrases the whole question of salvation in a cruel and beautiful paradox, is averted; and the threads of motive and meaning wind up in a thoroughly messy theological tangle.

Nevertheless, right down to their final act of betrayal, the moviemakers are sensitively loyal to most of Greene's transcendent meanings, and catch them, like mysteriously luminous fish, in a well-spread net of images. The result is something less than Greene's brilliant attempt to plumb the nature of pity; but it is at least a cruelly beautiful picture of a man who made a sin of saintliness.

When the story begins, middle-aged Captain Scobie (Trevor Howard) has been a colonial police officer in Sierra Leone, British West Africa, for about 15 years. He is, as his wife says, "a good second man . . . the man who always does the work," but he has a special quality of sympathetic understanding. Furthermore, Scobie's Roman Catholicism is of a very devout and serious kind.

Louise Scobie (Elizabeth Allan), the wife, is a species of clinging vine; her husband has not cut her loose because he pities her, and feels "a sense of responsibility for what she has become." Pity and the sense of responsibility have become the quiet passions of Scobie's quiet life.

Then one day Scobie falls in love with a 19-year-old girl (Maria Schell). Their raptures are brief. The heat, the secrecy, the difference in their ages, the knowing that they can never marry-all these things tell on their nerves. In the end, blackmailed by the villain, who has intercepted a love letter, Scobie is driven to crime in order to protect his wife from the knowledge that he loves another. And haunting him every moment is the sense that two women now, not just one, hold him to blame, as Scobie blames himself, for their unhappiness. A crime against Heaven, added to his crimes against men, seals Scobie's fate. He takes Communion, while in mortal sin, in order to hide that mortal sin from his wife. With the despair of the damned, he determines to commit suicide. "God, condemn me!" he cries. "But give rest unto them!" The ironies that ricocheted so savagely through Greene's final pages are all forsaken in the film for a pitifully sleazy out; just as Scobie is about to do himself in, the job is done for him by some brawling blacks.

The failure at the finish, however, is less important than a blunder at the beginning: the picture does not teach the audience to feel how Scobie feels about God, and until the spectator has that experience, he cannot experience the tragedy in its religious depths. What can be grasped, what is intensely set forth, is the tragedy of a man who is cursed with pity--the "folly" so terrible, in Nietzsche's pagan view, that it had killed God Himself.

Seldom has a film expounded an abstract entity with such heart-wringing concreteness. Trevor Howard as Scobie is pity in the flesh; and, moreover, a spectator gets the sense that he is not one aspect of the hero in one scene, and another in another, but the whole man at every moment. Vienna-born Maria Schell, playing her third role in English, is just right as the young girl. She shows innocence, lustiness, angelic grace and moral crassness in just the proportions that might tempt a fellow of Scobie's age and situation.

Whatever his mistakes, Director George More O'Ferrall can take credit, with Cameraman Jack Hildyard, for a powerful use of the camera to catch a mood. Hard and clear as the Syrian villain's eye, the frame takes in a stupefied huddle of tropical port: the tiny, eyeless box-buildings, the hot grey roads, the depraved palms, the dirty water that slides about the harbor. Beneath every scene is the sense of the black human jungle waiting to swallow all importance, and down upon everything blasts the terrible sun, like a pagan god who has come too near and made human life unbearable.

Gateof Hell(Daiei; Edward Harrison). The first Japanese attempt to shoot in color according to modern techniques (learned in the U.S. at the Eastman Laboratories and Warner Brothers' studios) is a treatise on cinema chromatics that Western moviemakers may be pondering for years to come. (The film's importance has already been acknowledged with a Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival of 1954.) Western moviegoers will experience the pure delight of soothing their eyeballs, scorched by so many Technicolored prairie fires, with a rainbow hung in a legendary mist.

The story of Gate of Hell, which traces back to a 12th century chronicle, is a fairly close parallel to the Roman tale of the Rape of Lucrece. A beautiful noblewoman, Lady Kesa (Machiko Kyo), is desired by a warrior named Moritoh (Kazuo Hasegawa), a man of demonic ferocity. Lady Kesa is already married, but Moritoh swears he will have her anyway. One night, with a message that her aged aunt is ill, he lures her into his power. Insane with desire, the brute threatens that if she does not get rid of her husband, he will kill them both, and the aunt, too. Lady Kesa affects to give in, and together they arrange how Moritoh. will butcher her husband in his bed. Lady Kesa, however, contrives that her husband shall sleep in another room, and dies in his stead. The moral: "A heart is not to be won by force."

The point is handsomely thrust home by Actor Hasegawa, Japan's leading matinee idol and a bit too handsome, who in every spasm of his currish courage shows violence for what it is: the day of the beast in a human soul. Machiko Kyo, an actress who was trained as a dancer and who appeared in Rashomon and Ugetsu, moves like a figure wooed to life from an antique fan.

At times, Director Teinosuke Kinugasa and his gifted adviser on color, a painter named Sanzo Wada, catch the mood of those monstrous feudal murals of Nippon, where gods and men and demons pother insanely in an ecstasy of bloodshed. A moment later there is peace, and the pink poppy blows by the darkly silver sea. Black horses thunder down the strand, their scarves a screaming purple against the green land. Suddenly a temple appears, mild and holy in white and gold, floating in the midst of a pale lake. And time and again, as the actors move in their flowered robes among the peaceable abstractions of the Japanese architecture, they seem like deities wafted through the realm of pure idea.

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