The New Pictures

The Member of the Wedding (Stanley Kramer; Columbia) is a twelve-year-old girl named Frankie, poised between childhood and adolescence in an "empty, ugly house" somewhere in the Deep South. Here she lives out her dreams with two other lonely people: her solemn, bespectacled, six-year-old cousin and playmate, John Henry (Brandon de Wilde), and Berenice, the Negro cook (Ethel Waters). In her desire to "belong," the motherless Frankie romantically identifies herself with her about-to-be-married brother and his bride, and plans to accompany them on their honeymoon.

When she is rejected as a "member of the wedding," the grief-stricken girl runs away, returning home after a night of terror on a honky-tonk street. The fade-out finds her "a member of the whole world." Her summer illusions have been replaced by an interest in a real world that includes both boys and the music of Rachmaninoff.

Carson McCullers' 1946 short novel and her prizewinning 1950 stage adaptation were fresh, fine-strung variations on a theme: the ache and elation of preadolescence. The movie is also based on mood rather than dramatic incident. At times the down-to-earth movie camera is at odds with this fragile, poetic mood piece. At other times the film seems to be more play than picture: it comes most vibrantly alive when it forsakes the one-set stage original and, untrammeled by high-flown talk, roves through the neighborhood, e.g., Frankie's journey through blaring, glaring honky-tonk town. But the total effect is nonetheless a film poem. In Fred (High Noon) Zinnemann's direction, it often reaches successfully for that most elusive of movie qualities--the catch in the throat.

The three leading players all repeat their stage roles. Making her movie debut, elfin-faced Julie Harris (who won a New York Drama Critics Circle award for her stage portrayal of Frankie) gives a breathless performance: now she is Frankie in a boyish crew cut, gawky and all elbows ("You have the sharpest set of human bones I ever felt," says Berenice); then she is the romantic Miss F. Jasmine Adams, frail-handed and full of a dreamy grace and pensive beauty. At one moment she throws a knife at Berenice, in the next cuddles up in her lap. But for all her lightning acting range, the ruthless, close-up camera sometimes reveals the fact that this is a 26-year-old actress play-acting at being a twelve-year-old girl. As the big, motherly Berenice, Ethel Waters gives a richly compassionate performance that is the most full-bodied in the film. Most effective shot: Ethel Waters rocking the two lonely children to her bosom while singing the hymn His Eye Is on the Sparrow.

Come Back, Little Sheba (Hal Wallis; Paramount) is a minor but moving tragedy on a major theme: the lives of quiet desperation that men lead. Its central characters are two mismated people: Doc (Burt Lancaster), who was once a promising medical student, and "pretty Lola" (Shirley Booth), who once had lots of beaux. Then Doc got Lola into trouble and had to marry her; their baby died. Now, after 20 years which seems to have "vanished into thin air," Doc is a chiropractor and a reformed drunk, while Lola is "old, fat and sloppy," with nothing on her mind but dreams of a lost puppy, Little Sheba, which is her own private symbol of the happy past. When their student boarder (Terry Moore) appears to have turned slut as Lola once did, Doc goes off on an alcoholic bender. By the time he returns from his drunk cure, a beaten, humbled man, Lola is facing the fact that Little Sheba has gone for good.

Like William Inge's 1950 play, which Daniel Mann (who also directed the stage version) has carefully and faithfully transferred to the screen, the picture skirts the chaotic core of its subject, substituting pity for penetration, sympathy for real insight. The film also blunts some of the drama's edges (e.g., the seduction of the college student) because of the requirements of screen censorship. But the movie remains a generally honest and affecting examination of a marriage dying piecemeal from a sort of emotional anemia. The picture is at its best when it owes least to the stage play--in James Wong Howe's evocatively drab photography, and in such scenes of slack and silence as when Lola stands entranced at the kitchen door watching Terry and her athlete boy friend

(Richard Jaeckel) neck in the parlor. Forsaking his usual swashbuckling roles, Burt Lancaster plays the sleepwalking Doc with great earnestness, but his performance frequently makes the character seem wooden rather than frustrated. It is in Shirley Booth's characterization that the movie really catches fire. Making her screen debut at 45, after some twoscore years of success on stage and radio (she was the original Miss Duffy of Duffy's Tavern), auburn-haired Actress Booth, shiftlessly waddling around and prattling away endlessly in a singsong voice, does a highly skillful job of bringing the gabby, good-natured, slatternly Lola to life. For her stage portrayal of Lola, Shirley Booth won five awards (New York Drama Critics Circle, Newspaper Guild, Donaldson, Barter, Antoinette Perry). Her screen characterization may yet win her a sixth: an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Oscar, for which she is already being enthusiastically boomed.

Stars and Stripes Forever (20th Century-Fox) is a brassy movie based on the life of the late bandmaster and march king, John Philip Sousa. Inspired by Sousa's autobiography, Marching Along, the picture is a sketchy cinemusical rather than a fully orchestrated biography. Between booming Sousa marches, the movie depicts Sousa as a frustrated ballad writer who conducted the U.S. Marine Corps band (which he led under five Presidents --from Rutherford Hayes to Benjamin Harrison). In 1892 he formed his own band, which successfully toured the world. For musical variety, there are snatches from some of Sousa's light operas. And for romance, there is a fictional--and fairly flat--subplot involving a young marine in Sousa's band (Robert Wagner) and a burlesque beauty (Debra Paget).

Decked out in beard and spectacles, Clifton Webb plays Sousa as a wry, rather pixyish personality. But the role gives ex-Dancer Webb an opportunity to do the two-step, which was introduced in 1890 to the strains of Sousa's Washington Post march. Stars and Stripes Forever hits a few sour notes in its long-winded dialogue stretches, but when it strikes up the band and plays the stuffing out of such rousing Sousa marches as Semper Fidelis and the title tune, it is a spirited show.

No Time for Flowers (Mort Briskin; RKO Radio) is an addlepated little romp that pits the party line against the romantic line in Behind-the-Iron-Curtairi Czechoslovakia. Viveca Lindfors is an unglamorous Prague secretary who stomps about dressed in what appears to be an old burlap bag, and whose clod of a boy friend woos her with gifts of herring. But soon a handsome comrade (Paul Christian), just returned from attache duty in the United States, shows up and starts to shower her with such capitalistic blessings as nylons, lipstick and champagne. He also offers her a bubble bath and a low-cut evening gown from Saks Fifth Avenue.

Naturally, these treasonous baubles turn Viveca's head. By the fadeout, the attache and the by-now-thoroughly-glamorous Viveca have escaped from Czechoslovakia to the U.S. zone in Austria, outwitting a political-police chief who is addicted to such pronouncements as "Love is purely a private enterprise. The state must come first." Of some interest in the proceedings are the authentic-looking backgrounds, filmed entirely in Austria.

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