The New Pictures

The Moon Is Blue (Preminger-Herbert; United Artists) brings the 1951 Broadway comedy hit about sex and virtue to the screen as a pleasant, entertaining movie that is notable chiefly for the way it frankly uses, for the first time on the screen, such words as "pregnant," "seduction," "virgin" and "mistress."

But for all its naughty dialogue. The Moon is a nice little picture. Its amorous skirmishes are verbal rather than real. Author F. Hugh (Kiss and Tell) Herbert calls it "a provocative comedy of purity." It has also been described as a bedroom farce set in a living room.

It tells of a shrewdly naive young girl who makes monkeys out of a couple of wolves by alternately teasing, tempting and mothering them. The girl and a handsome young architect meet by chance atop the Empire State Building observation tower, and wind up in his apartment. A middle-aged playboy enters the scene. The proceedings are, however, scrupulously moral. The girl is a charmingly outspoken young creature who is adequately armed with her own innocence. The architect is an honorable fellow (he gets the girl to the altar in the end). Even the roue becomes talkative and rueful when it comes right down to sin.

As the heroine, Maggie McNamara has a pert, wide-eyed, fresh-scrubbed charm. David Niven is appropriately debonair as the playboy. In the role of the architect, William Holden does one of his easy, authoritative acting jobs, that is all the more effective for not seeming like acting at all. The trio of leading characters appear as likable, essentially well-behaved people, in a picture that is always sophisticated, literate and in good taste.

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For a minor film comedy, The Moon Is Blue has already raised a major censorship rumpus. On the ground that its dialogue is too blue, the Roman Catholic Legion of Decency (which gave the play a "B" or "unobjectionable for adults" rating) has given the movie a "C" or "condemned" rating. Last week New York's Francis Cardinal Spellman, in a letter to pastors of churches in his archdiocese, denounced the picture as "an occasion of sin" and as violating "standards of morality and decency." Cardinal Spellman urged Catholics to boycott it when it opens at two Manhattan theaters on July 9. The movie industry's self-censoring agency--the Production Code Administration--has refused it a seal of approval, which has made it difficult in the past for a picture to play the large theater circuits.* On the other hand, the movie has been approved by the National Board of Review and four (New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Massachusetts) of the seven U.S. state censor boards have passed the picture, with only Kansas banning it thus far.

Since advance showings of the movie have indicated that it will be a commercial success, the odds are that it will manage to get many theater bookings even without a Production Code seal and in spite of church objections. A German-language version called Die Jungfrau auf dem Dach (The Virgin on the Roof), which was shot simultaneously in Hollywood, will be shown in Germany soon.

Producers Herbert and Otto Preminger (who also directed) argue that to tone down the original would be to lose the play's outspoken freshness. They point out, further, that the play has run all over the U.S. without raising any moral protests, and that any number of current movies are far more tawdry, sensual and suggestive. The Moon Is Blue controversy may well turn out to be a major test of screen censorship. But whatever the outcome, it appears certain that all the hullabaloo will help The Moon Is Blue wind up in the black at the box office.

O.K. Nero (Niccolo Theodoli; Italian Film Export) is the first of what may be a cycle of foreign films ribbing American movies.** This Italian production, with English dubbed in, is a satire on the type of superspectacle exemplified by Hollywood's Quo Vadis. If Quo Vadis was one of the costliest ($6,500,000) movies ever made, O.K. Nero is certainly one of the silliest. It has knockdown clowning, pratfalls, songs, dances, and an existentialist ballet. Constantly rowdy, it is only intermittently funny.

The central characters are a couple of Abbott & Costello-like American sailors (Walter Chiari and Carlo Campanini) who are knocked out by thugs while sightseeing in the Colosseum and dream that they are having all sorts of misadventures in ancient Rome. Among the picture's low-comedy highlights: the voluptuous Empress Poppea (Silvana Pampanini) taking a milk bath that out-DeMilles De-Mille; the sailors engaging in a pocket-billiard contest with Nero (Gino Cervi); gladiators waging a savage football game in the Colosseum with a Grecian urn as a pigskin; a Roman orgy with jitterbugging; a frenzied chariot race in which one of the vehicles is driven by Hopalong Cassius.

It Came from Outer Space (Universal-International) is one of those modestly budgeted, neatly tooled little thrillers that Hollywood turns out without fanfare from time to time. Based on a story by Ray Bradbury, it is a crisp combination of shocker and sociological comment. It tells of a Martian space ship that lands in the Arizona desert and of the chaos the visitors from outer space cause before they depart.

As readers of Bradbury's science fiction will guess, his Martians are no mere bogymen. They are highly intelligent, peace-loving beings who happen to land on the earth by error while on their way to another planet. All they want is to repair their space ship and move on. They do not want to encounter any human beings, who have not reached the advanced stage of civilization essential to such a meeting. The Martians' appearance--the face is a bare, embryo-like mass with a looming eye fixed in the center--would alarm the humans, and, as one of the characters in the picture says, "What men don't understand, they destroy." Thus, in order to go about repairing their ship, the Martians disguise themselves as humans, adopting the shapes of certain men and women in the vicinity.

Except for a couple of quick, vivid shots the Martians are not seen on the screen. But the story is occasionally told from the Martian point of view, as seen through a shimmering, eyelike bubble of film. Director Jack Arnold has made good use .of the barren brooding desert expanses with their lonely, unreal look of another world, and the picture is well acted, particularly by Richard Carlson as a mystically inclined astronomer. As was more or less inevitable, the picture is in 3-D, but the extra dimension does not add much to the drama. It is the least obtrusive depth process to date, with a minimum of objects popping out at the audience from the screen.

The Marshal's Daughter (Ken Murray; United Artists), undoubtedly one of the worst westerns ever made, seems to have a little of everything in it: a gun-shooting crisis, reminiscent of High Noon, with clocks inexorably moving toward midnight; a barroom brawl scene from an old Hoot Gibson silent; veteran Cowboy Gibson himself as a U.S. marshal whose blonde daughter (Laurie Anders) sings, dances, does a ventriloquist act and is equally expert at shooting, riding and jujitsu; guest appearances by such familiar faces from the wide-open spaces as Tex Ritter, Preston Foster, Jimmy Wakely, Buddy Baer, Johnny Mack Brown; a theme song called The Marshal's Daughter, renegade Indians, a mysterious masked rider, a cowboy quartet, dancing girls, rustlers on a rampage. Comedian-Producer Ken (Blackouts) Murray is intrepid enough to show up in front of the camera himself at one point as a riverboat entertainer sporting a high hat, checkered suit and gargantuan cigar.

* The last big Hollywood censorship case involved The Outlaw, which was shown briefly without a Production Code seal in 1941 and again in 1946. After years of wrangling, Producer Howard Hughes tidied up the film (and his ads) and received an official purity seal in 1949. **Others now shooting: The Littlest Show on Earth, an Italian 3-D spoof of Cecil B. De-Mille's 1951 circus epic, The Greatest Show on Earth: Public Enemy No. i, a lampoon of Hollywood gangster films, with French Comic Fernandel.

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