The New Pictures

The Angel Wore Red (Titanus-Specta-tor; MGM) is a turbid Kleenex-sopper about an unfrocked priest (Dirk Bogarde) and a cabaret girl (Ava Gardner) who is frocked, but just barely. Bogarde and Gardner fall into intimate clutch during one of the first air raids of the Spanish Civil War. That very morning Bogarde had left the church because its hierarchy sympathized with Francisco Franco's rebels. But after the raid, in the kind of irony that cuts like a rubber dagger, he is hunted down by a mob of enraged Loyalists who have convinced themselves that the city's priests signaled enemy planes from the cathedral tower. (The Loyalists are represented as Communistic priest-murderers, and Franco's troops as mostly good joes.)

A good deal of heavyweight drama follows, much of it involving a holy relic that the villains want to get their hands on. Joseph Gotten honors cinematic tradition as a U.S. war correspondent. He wears an eye patch and is dressed in what looks like an Italian tailor's interpretation of Winston Churchill's siren suit. Nunnally Johnson is deeply involved; he wrote the film and directed it.

The Dark at the Top of the Stairs

(Warner) is a friendly, fairly shrewd but not really profound look at some inhabitants of a small Oklahoma town. The time is the early 19205. and this is William Inge country--several hundred miles safely north of the swamps of Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers. but still south of that region where Booth Tar-kington's characters inhabit a perpetual fishworm and firecracker July. The people in the film made from Inge's 1957 Broadway hit have problems, but they do not include necrophilia, cannibalism or self-mutilation with garden shears; the difficulties are the sort a strong man can stare in the eye.

The strong man in question is a boisterous and usually self-confident fellow who is troubled because his wife nags him about money and keeps primly to her own side of the bed, his young schoolboy son is ragged by bullies, his daughter is afraid of boys, and he himself, being a harness salesman in the decade of the tin lizzie, has lost his job. Pat Hingle gave the Broadway role a ring of rowdiness soured by doubt. Robert (The Music Man) Preston performs rousingly in the considerably enlarged film part. But the ring of his lines is not doubt --it is seventy-six trombones.

Playwright Inge's intention, put over-simply, was to show that each soul has its dark places, and that people can, with love, help each other past these stair tops. Actor Preston just does not behave like a man afraid of the dark. He roars about, spending energy as if he could plow a field without a horse. The viewer knows that Preston will get another job, and can only grin when the frustrated fellow complains that his wife (Dorothy McGuire) treats him "like change from a nickel" and thunders out of the house vowing that "Ah'm goan to see Mavis Pruitt and ah'm goan to drink booze and ah'm goan to raise every other kind of hell ah kin think of."

The curious thing is that although this moving picture is schizoid, most of its faces are worth attention. The problems --Preston's apart--are convincingly presented, and in general the solutions are not pat. Actress McGuire plays a limited part well, and Shirley Knight is outstandingly effective as the tormented daughter.

Between shouting matches. Actor Preston gaily galumphs through some fine, if slightly incongruous, comedy scenes. Director Delbert Mann handles these scenes well, and only occasionally does he allow situations to descend to the level that is fondly known in the women's fiction trade as "heartwarming."

All the Fine Young Cannibals (Avon; M-S-M) proves once again that while inspiration may falter, color cameras never get tired. The anthropophagi of the title are four unpleasant young folks from Texas (Robert Wagner, Natalie Wood, George Hamilton and Susan Kohner). Poor Boy Wagner loves Poor Girl Wood --carelessly, as it turns out. Spurning his offer of honorable wedlock, she boards an eastbound train, meets suave Yaleman Hamilton and, smelling riches, lets herself be plied with strong drink from his portable pigskin bar. He has her way with her, so to speak. Later, learning that Natalie is pregnant and not suspecting that he is not the father, Hamilton marries the girl and rents a mansion in New Haven that is conveniently near to classes.

Actress Kohner is a young woman with excellent teeth who plays Hamilton's sister. Her lines run to such glass-crackers as "ah had to convince Mother that ah would commit man very own suicide if ah didn't have man way." Eventually she tries suicide her very own way, and the script implies that her parents are largely to blame. In fact, the film is very severe with parents; all the brats have culpable elders.

Soon the scene shifts from the sinful luxury of the Ivy League to the saloons of New York. Actor Wagner, the Texan left behind, has become a huge success as, of all things, a trumpet player. To spite Natalie, he marries Susan, which seems to be carrying spite too far. For a while it looks as if the four young marrieds will not live happily ever after, but the only character who comes to a bad end is Singer Pearl Bailey. She is supposed to be a blues singer dying of unrequited love, but actually her malady looks more like embarrassment.

Day of the Painter (Litfle Movies), an extremely funny 15-minute film, may be taken as a solemn leg-pull of the recent vogue for dribble-and-splotch painters, those athletic canvas-coverers whose style owes less to Van Gogh's brush technique than to Stan Laurel's custard pie stance. Or it may be taken as an explicit set of instructions for getting rich.

The film, a first-time effort by three ex-admen, begins with a loving shot of wharfs, fishing shacks and the sounding sea--the sort of vista once sketched avidly by artists and now appreciated chiefly by retired couples who tour Cape Cod in late September. The artist is a burly fellow (Ezra Reuben Baker), recognizably aesthetic in paint-smeared dungarees, scurrilous red sweater and combat boots. He trundles a cart filled with paint buckets along a dock, then throws an enormous sheet of wallboard down on a mud flat ten feet below.

Soberly, with exquisite skill, using first a vigorous forehand, then a precisely executed backhand, the painter slops color from buckets. Clearly he is a master, for his stroke with the long-handled hoe is sure and strong, his touch with the dribble-stick more than Japanese in its delicacy. And when he fills a flare pistol with paint and fires the last accent of orange at his abstraction, he does not pull the trigger. He squeezes.

When the thing dries, he hacks it up in random rectangles with a power saw, then carefully signs each fragment. A seaplane, labeled "Galerie des Abstracts, Paris-New York," touches down. A man debarks whose rich, dark overcoat obviously proclaims him an art dealer. He strokes his jaw as he examines the paintings, eventually selects a small one, shakes hands with the painter and takes off. Pleased with himself, the painter matter-of-factly shoves the remaining works of art into the ocean. This, as the screen truly proclaims, is the end.

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