Newsreel

P: Producer-Director John Huston announced plans to film Jean Anouilh's The Lark, using a new English translation of the original script rather than the adaptation by Christopher Fry which played in England or Lillian Hellman's adaptation now playing on Broadway. Huston picked French Star Suzanne Flon (Moulin Rouge) for the Joan of Arc role, now played on Broadway by Julie Harris.

P: Analyzing television's threat to the movies, the Hollywood Reporter offered one more proof that no audience will pay to see on the screen what it can see free at home: despite a high-powered publicity campaign, said the Reporter, Liberace's Sincerely Yours has proved to be one of the year's biggest box-office flops.

P: With the Hollywood premiere becoming gaudier every year, Los Angeles Columnist Kendis Rochlen handed out some tongue-in-cheek tips to premiere-goers. Two important rules: never show up on time ("Gauge your timing according to your prestige; no self-respecting big star would dream of showing up by 8:30"), and provide "double insurance" ("By accidentally dropping a glove or handkerchief and starting to lean over to pick it up, a star can often put her best features forward for the photographers").

The New Pictures

Samurai (Homel; Fine Arts Films] rivets the eye with its swift alternations of animal ferocity and morning calm. Like the prizewinning Gate of Hell (TIME, Dec. 13), this new Japanese film begins with a disordered 17th century battle piece: a flood of lance-waving horsemen surge across a meadow; agile warriors skip and pirouette in a whirling of two-handed blades; the defeated topple, with blood bursting between their clenched teeth. The struggle ends in far-off shouting as mists steal down from the mountains to draw a pale blanket over the slain.

Two wounded survivors, using each other as crutches, hobble away from the stricken field to find sanctuary in an isolated farmhouse, where a mother and daughter dress their wounds. One of the men, Rentaro Mikuni, longs to go back home to the girl he left behind, but he is weak-willed, and the women use him for their own purpose. The other, Toshiro Mifune, is a bullnecked, snarling ruffian who dreams of avenging the lost battle by becoming a great samurai. He soon has a chance when a rabble of bandits raid the farm. Toshiro kills the bandit chief and routs his men, then becomes a beast of the hills. He sweeps back into his native village, scattering the militia like a cat in a hen roost.

Samurai now propounds its moral: that a headstrong man is of no use to his nation unless he is tamed by virtue. While regiments of armed men scour the hills for Toshiro, a deceptively jolly priest (Kuroemon Onoe) and a frightened girl (Kaoru Yachigusa) ensnare him with kindness. Brought home, Toshiro is trussed up like a maniac and suspended from a tall tree. Each morning and evening the priest inquires if his spirit is broken, and Toshiro answers with howling curses. The girl frees the prisoner, but the wily priest traps Toshiro again, this time locks him in a tower to learn docility in solitary confinement and wisdom from the ancient books of Japan. Freed after many years, Toshiro must abandon the girl and dedicate himself to the long task of uniting his fragmented country.

Director Hiroshi Inagaki uses color film with as much facility as if he had invented it, and sometimes, in following one of Toshiro's berserk rages, the camera appears to circle warily as though a closer approach would invite its own destruction. The girl, Kaoru Yachigusa, splendidly suggests the tempered steel that lies beneath the mannered poise of a Japanese maiden, and Toshiro packs his role with all the deadly menace of a human grenade with the pin of reason removed.

Three Stripes in the Sun (Columbia) is an earnest, strong-minded little picture that advises the U.S. Army not only to love its enemies but to marry them. The story material has a woof of truth in it: Hugh O'Reilly, a sergeant with the U.S. occupation forces in Japan, really did raise $180,000 in contributions to rehouse a Roman Catholic orphanage in Japan, and in the process fell out of hate with Nippon and in love with one of its daughters, whom he married. However, the truth is warped with fiction that develops about as much originality as an Army menu, and with the aboriginal behavior of Aldo Ray, an aggressively virile actor who sounds as if even his vocal cords need a shave. Moviegoers, who never seem to tire of hearing that sergeants are human, may have their doubts about this one.

Umberto D. (produced by Rizzoli-De Sica-Amato; released by Ed Harrison) may well be the last fierce rose of that high creative summer (1945-51) in which the Italian cinema came to full bloom. It has a hard perfection, but its odor of unremitting truth is not inviting to the moviegoing millions. Partly for this reason, and partly because it makes some mild social criticism, the picture was little shown in Italy and hardly at all outside that country for more than three years after it was made. Last week, thanks to an enterprising distributor named Ed Harrison, Umberto D. was on view in Manhattan, and was scheduled to play in six major U.S. cities.

The film is a cruel little elegy in the skeptic mood of T. S. Eliot's Gerontion. The central figure is an old man (Carlo Battisti) who wants nothing but a quiet corner to die in. His landlady (Lina Gennari) is determined to kick him out of it and get a better rent. To cut expenses, he eats at a civic kitchen--bitter bread, washed down with insults. Back home he finds a transient couple in his bed, and has to wait in the kitchen. The cook (Maria Pia Casilio), a simple young thing from the country, confesses to him that she is pregnant and does not know who the father is. The old man is shocked and feels sympathy, but he has too many problems of his own to worry about hers.

He fakes a serious illness and is admitted to a charity ward. After a day or two he gets lonesome for his little dog

Flick, the only thing in the world he loves and that loves him, and he goes home. To his horror he finds that the decorators have begun renovating. The blonds are out, the furniture is stacked in the middle of the room, the paper is off the walls. Worse, yet, his dog has run away. In anguish he rushes out to pore through the infinite, indifferent city. Is there any way out of this nightmare? There is, but the old man does not have the nerve to take it. In the last scene he is condemned to life.

To those how can take it on its own terms, Umberto D. will rightfully seem a masterpiece. Director Vittorio De Sica and Scriptwriter Cesare Zavattini (Shoeshine, The Bicycle Thief) have conceded nothing to popular taste, everything to the facts of life and and the needs of art as they see them. The result is not a story that unfolds, but a life that happens--happens at some moments with a white heat that melts truth into shining poetry.

But for all its excellence, Umberto D. has a crippling defect. De Sica set out to show "the drama of man's inability to communicate with his fellow men," and he cutely rigged his plot in favor of his proposition. The old man is by no means a fairly representative figure for "man." He is so old that he is withdrawing from life. Furthermore, De Sica has given the poor fellow almost nobody to communicate with--no wife, no children, no relatives, no friends. The spectator cannot help feeling that this is not the way things are, even with most old people; that in fact the old man is the victim of bad people in a bad society.

Umberto D. is a cry of pain and despair at the impersonal cruelty of modern life. There is certainly justice in the protest, but there is even more emotion. It is the negative emotion discharged by impotence, the tainted romanticism that murmurs bitterly, "Goodbye, cruel world." In the widest sense, Umberto D. is a powerful image of what is old and tired in Europe. As such, it may try the patience of a younger people, but it will sometimes touchingly reward their patience, too.

CURRENT & CHOICE

Guys and Dolls. Marlon Brando, Jean Simmons, Frank Sinatra, Vivian Blaine in Samuel Goldwyn's $5,000,000 version of the Broadway musical. It's a beaut, but Sam made the prints too long (TIME, Nov. 14).

The Big Knife. Clifford Odets gums away at some sour grapes, and spits the seeds at Hollywood; with Jack Palance, Ida Lupino (TIME, Oct. 24).

The Desperate Hours. A man's home is his prison in the thriller-diller of the season; with Fredric March, Humphrey Bogart (TIME, Oct. 10).

Trial. A termite's-eye view of how U.S. Communists bore a worthy cause from within; with Glenn ford, Arthur Kennedy (TIME, Oct. 3).

I AM a Camera. Julie Harris, at both hooch and cootch, is a comic sensation (TIME, Aug. 15).

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