The New Pictures

Cry, the Beloved Country (London Films; Lopert), Alan Paton's eloquent 1948 novel about South African race relations, after being translated into everything from Zulu to Broadwayese, now comes to the screen. The cinemadaptation was done by Author Paton* and the picture is largely faithful to the original.

Unhappily, the film betrays its literary origin by stressing emotion rather than motion. It is the tale of the Rev. Stephen Kumalo (Canada Lee), a simple Zulu minister who journeys from Ndotsheni, Natal to the great, bewildering city of Johannesburg to find his lost sister. There he discovers that she has become a prostitute in the squalid; segregated shantytown where the plight of black-skinned people in a white man's world is shockingly evident. The black voyager also finds that his only child, Absalom, has murdered a young white champion of the oppressed Negroes. The victim, by a further twist of fate (and fiction), is the son of the Negro-hating landowner (Charles Carson) in whose district the minister lives. In the end, the two fathers, symbolically drawn together by a common tragedy, point up Paton's comfort-in-desolation moral of hate cast out by love.

Zoltan Korda affectionately filmed the picture almost entirely in the real locales: Ixopo, Carisbrooke and Johannesburg. There are expansive shots of rolling green hills, played-out mining areas and savage slums. But the camera, with its realistic eye, can also confine and shackle. Though Cry, the Beloved, Country has much of the novel's passion, it has lost some of the poetry. The lens brings into harsh focus the artifices which trick out the theme yet cast little light on the problems of the dark continent.

Actor Lee, required to be unremittingly noble and agonized from start to finish, gives an impressive and often moving performance as the humble man of faith. In Lee's acting, the picture comes closest to reverberating with the novel's outcry against waste and inhumanity in the beloved country of sun and gold.

Phone Call from a Stranger (20th Century-Fox) is a cinematic party line on which several conversations are going at once, none of them coming across very distinctly. In Producer-Writer Nunnally Johnson's adaptation of an I.A.R. Wylie story, the stranger is an attorney (Gary Merrill) who is running out on his unfaithful wife. On a plane trip, he meets a brassy stripteaser (Shelley Winters) with a heart of gold and mother-in-law trouble, a moody medico (Michael Rennie) who is morally sick over a past misdeed, and a loudmouthed traveling salesman (Keenan Wynn). When the plane crashes, the attorney is the only one of the quartet who survives. In the process of reconstructing the three casualties' lives, his own problems conveniently fall into place, too.

Though the plot is thick, the characterizations are thin, and the film as a whole is slack as well as slick. The cast provides some flashy playacting, notably by Bette Davis as a bedridden paralytic.

Sailor Beware (Paramount) is the fifth rough & tumble film in three years to star the comedy team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis (rated the No. 2 box-office attraction by U.S. exhibitors in 1951). Like the other four movies, it will lay Martin & Lewis fans in the aisles, leave other moviegoers mystified. Casually based on the 1933 Broadway hit of the same name, Sailor Beware's plot provides a sketchy continuity to Martin & Lewis' vaudeville turns. These range from the grisly (Lewis is repeatedly stabbed with a hypodermic needle in an effort to draw blood from his vegetable-like body) to the satiric (on a TV show, Lewis happily discovers that mention of any U.S. city--from Brooklyn to Sheboygan--wins thunderous applause from the studio audience).

As comedians, Martin & Lewis resemble a two-man Milton Berle. Like Berle, Dean Martin is brashly self-confident, always ready with the knowing leer. Like Berle, Jerry Lewis twists his arms and legs into grotesque positions; his voice alternates between a high, cretinous whine and a low, idiot mumble; he stares at the camera with crossed eyes and unhinged jaw and, for variety, pantomimes effeminacy.

Producer Hal Wallis, with the cooperation of the U.S. Navy, was able to use a Navy training center in San Diego and a submarine at sea as main sets for his funnymen. The film's resemblance to old-time burlesque is underlined by the presence of bosomy Corinne Calvet, and by Marion Marshall and a bevy of girls whose only duty seems to be to chase hysterically after Jerry Lewis.

Submarine Command (Paramount] is a flat distillation of most of the underwater plots that Hollywood has been siphoning into movie houses for decades. The script revolves around the dilemma of Executive Officer William Holden, who, on the last day of World War II, orders the U.S.S. Tiger Shark submerged while the wounded captain is still on the Jap-strafed conning tower.* Holden is assured by his superiors that he acted for the good of the craft and crew, but he is gnawed by guilt. So obsessed does he become with his conscience that his wife (Nancy Olson) leaves him and consoles herself with Lieut. Commander Don Taylor, a more cheerful type. But, before you can say "upscope," the Tiger Shark is de-mothballed for Korean action, and Holden proves himself a hero at rescuing enemy-held American prisoners. As a result, he wins back his wife as well as the respect of Chief Torpedoman William Bendix. The fade-out finds a new Tiger Shark being christened by Nancy, while Holden, their bouncing baby and Old Chief Bendix look on with beaming faces.

In its dramatic action scenes, Submarine Command is directed skillfully enough by John Farrow, but the landlocked portions of the picture occasionally reach nonsensical heights, despite the quietly commanding presence of Actor Holden.

* In Johannesburg last week Paton announced that current world conditions had left him feeling so "uncertain and politically frustrated" that he and his wife were going into seclusion for a year or more. His asylum: a Negro tuberculosis settlement some 25 miles from Durban where he will help with the manual labor.* A switch on the real-life story of Commander Howard W. Gilmore. Mortally wounded by Jap gunfire on the bridge of his submarine, Gilmore ordered his men to "Take her down!", rode to a hero's grave to save his craft.

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