The New Pictures

The Strange Ones (Jean-Pierre Melville; Mayer-Kingsley) are an adolescent brother & sister whose deep affection for each other is colored with inevitable tragedy. Adapted by France's Jean Cocteau from his 1929 novel, Les Enfants Terribles, The Strange Ones is a baroque, grotesque, always fascinating excursion into a dark-bright dream world, set off by a glacial commentary delivered in the author's own dry, precise voice.

Blonde, boyish Elizabeth (Nicole Stephane) and ailing, somnambulistic Paul (Edouard Dermithe) live like "two limbs of the same body," isolated from the outside world in an unreal, fabulously disordered "turtle's shell" of a room in a Montmartre apartment. In this chamber, "balanced on the brink of a myth," they play in utter unselfconsciousness a childish-grown-up sort of game: prancing and pluming themselves, idolizing and tormenting each other, cramming themselves gluttonously with a sticky hodgepodge of sensations.

When their invalid mother dies, Paul and Elizabeth move to a seaside hotel and then to an 18-room town house, where they screen off one corner of a vast, jumbled gallery. But by then the outside world--in the persons of their friends Agatha and Gerard, who have fallen in love with them--has pried open the door to their secret chamber. The two children who refuse to grow up are unable to survive the sudden, chilling glare of reality.

This twilight zone of murky pathological recesses and phantom feelings is, in Jean-Pierre Melville's direction, as effective cinematically as it is poetic. As in Cocteau's 1948 movie, Les Parents Terribles, the camera roves freely and fluently through the disorder of the children's room. There are odd, feverish screen compositions, e.g., the great, grappling close-up in which, as Agatha tells Elizabeth of her love for Paul, only Agatha's forehead is seen on the screen, with Elizabeth's strange, grey face hanging above it. As the Cocteau children, Nicole Stephane with her short, curly hair and Edouard Dermithe with his masklike pallor are as gravely handsome as young Greek deities, as cruel and capricious as little beasts. They are indeed terrible young ones, who resemble each other physically as well as in their temperaments of fire and ice. In the background, a swelling Vivaldi-Bach concerto score shores up the fragmented melodramatics of this brilliantly macabre Cocteau party.

She's Working Her Way Through College (Warner) poses a solemn problem: Is a burlesque queen (Virginia Mayo) with a yen for culture entitled to a college education? The answer is yes, mainly because of the brave battle for academic freedom waged by Theater Arts Professor Ronald Reagan. "Hot Garters Gertie," as the bump & grind artist is known, is saved from expulsion when Professor Reagan threatens to expose Board of Trustees Chairman Roland Winters as a wolf in sheepskin clothing who once gave Gertie a mink coat.

On close examination. She's Working Her Way Through College is seen to be a tuned-up, toned-down version of the 1940 James Thurber-Elliott Nugent stage comedy, The Male Animal.* In the play, the professor fought for the right to read a letter by Bartolomeo Vanzetti to his English class. In substituting a stripteaser for Vanzetti, the picture has been divested not only of the play's significance, but also of most of its rich humor. At one point in The Male Animal, the professor said: "A college should be concerned with ideas." Midwest State, as represented in She's Working Her Way Through College, is as devoid of ideas as it is of gaiety.

Island Rescue (J. Arthur Rank; Universal-International) has a real Venus for its leading lady. She is a goddess among cows, a triumph of scientific breeding, and she lives on the Channel island of Armorel. Since Venus is in calf by champion bull Mars of Mellowbury III, the expected progeny is of vital concern to the British Ministry of Agriculture.

When the Germans invade the island in 1940, Major David Niven is assigned to lead a commando raid on Armorel to rescue Venus. Meanwhile the enemy, headed by Commandant George Coulouris, is preparing to ship Venus to Germany. There ensues a tour de force of arms, with a British submarine braving minefields and Luftwaffe to reach Armorel, an artist hastingly camouflaging another cow to look like Venus in order to confound the Germans, and a battle in which a British destroyer sinks a German E-boat with depth charges.

The humor in Island Rescue sometimes wears a bit thin. But the picture is zestfully acted by a cast that includes Glynis Johns as a pretty A.T.S. private, and Carrefour Buttercup from the isle of Guernesey as Venus.

Wait 'Til the Sun Shines, Nellie (20th Century-Fox) is a Technicolored cavalcade of small-town Americana as seen as through the eyes of the local barber. Industrious "Professor" Ben Halper (David Wayne) brings his bride Nellie (Jean Peters) to the whistle-stop town of Sevillinois in 1895, and proudly shows her his two-chair parlor. From there on, as the soundtrack resounds to the strain of the title song: 1) Nellie runs off to Chicago with a slick Hardware-Store Owner Hugh Marlowe and dies in a train accident; 2) the shop burns down, and Wayne builds a new four-chair shop with an electric rotation barber pole; 3) brash young Benny Halper (Tommy Morton) grows up and marries Hardwareman Marlowe's red-haired daughter Eadie (Helene Stanley), joins her in a vaudeville song & dance team, falls in with Prohibition mobsters and is bumped off; 4) the town booms and so does Wayne's barbershop.

By this time Wayne is a doddering septuagenarian, left with only his memories and his granddaughter, little Nellie, who reminds him of his departed wife. And Wayne has shaved just about every whisker in Sevillinois--except those on Wait 'Til the Sun Shines, Nellie.

*First filmed in 1942 and now enjoying a hit revival on Broadway (TIME, May 12).

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