The New Pictures

The Sea Around Us (RKO Radio) is an attempt to do in pictures what Rachel Carson did with words in her bestseller about the eternal mother of the world, the sea. Picture for picture the feature-length film is quite as good as the book is word for word--there are glimpses of the green abyss of genesis that take the breath with their terror and loveliness. On this ground, there can be small quarrel with the Academy Award pronouncing The Sea the best Technicolor documentary made last year.

And yet, taken as a whole, the film is inferior to the book. For while Author Carson saw the sea as a poet might, with the inward eye, Director Irwin Allen sees it mostly through a very expensive anastigmatic lens. Though the movie is all about water, it strangely does not flow. The camera concentrates on episode after episode, like an observer stepping from tank to tank in an aquarium, not like a diver roaming through the stopless ocean.

Yet the individual episodes themselves are sometimes magnificently caught. There is the cold insanity of the wounded moray as it fights the spear, and glares hate from what is surely the most evil eye in creation. There is the merry jig of the infant octopus, no bigger than a finger, as it watches the underwater world it will inherit through the lucent membrane of its natal sac. There is the grave pavane of the beruffled nudibranchs, tiny fish that swirl among moving fronds like bright dancers in an oriental court. And there is the fish that walks, the fish that is nothing but a mouth, and the fish that shills for a poisonous anemone, luring other fish to their destruction; not to .forget the oddly compelling sight of a giant mother turtle, still, strong and impenetrable, laying her hundreds of grey little eggs in the warm sand by night.

The Sea is a promising if not too imaginative continuation of a recent Hollywood tendency to take a few cameras off famous faces and train them on the fascinating visage of nature itself. The pacemaker of this trend: Walt Disney's series on animal and vegetable life (Beaver Valley, Nature's Half-Acre, etc.). All these films have their faults; most of them, The Sea included, are burdened with a spoken commentary that comes little short of patronizing God. Yet they are giving ailing Hollywood a much-needed transfusion of real lifeblood.

Return to Paradise (Aspen; United Artists) would have made the perfect sequel for South Pacific if Rodgers & Hammerstein had draped it with some tunes.

Loosely based on James Michener's 1951 collection of stories, it has just the right setting -- a South Sea island that out-Bali-Ha'is Bali Ha'i -- plus the right blend of serious conflict and sarongs.

Gary Cooper, cast as a kind of seafaring vagabond, alights on the island, where a missionary of unspecified denomination (Barry Jones) has set up a kind of puritan police state that would have made Calvin's Geneva look like Las Vegas. The natives are marched to church by club-wielding wardens, bronzed maidens must be fully clothed at all times, and boys and girls who go swimming together are flogged. In this unhappy Eden, Cooper soon starts a-rebellion that is visually a lot more interesting than any saloon brawl in which he ever thrashed a bunch of cattle rustlers. One notably effective scene: the missionary's amazed and humble discovery that the natives will come to church without being driven by the wardens' clubs, simply because they want to pray.

At this point, the average movie plot might send the customers home, but this one goes right on to show Rugged Individualist Cooper falling in love with a native girl (charmingly played by U.S. Actress Roberta Haynes) who bears him a child out of wedlock.* Bored with light housekeeping in a grass hut, Cooper leaves the island, but returns during World War II and sees to it that his nearly grown-up daughter finds her Polynesian Mr. Right.

Old Cowhand Cooper's lean hips seem almost nude without a couple of trusty six-shooters, but the script allows him to remain as unbendingly oaken as ever in the face of all storms, meteorological as well as emotional, and he manages to make the tough, footloose sailing man reasonably credible. The picture's best feature: its richly authentic atmosphere. Filmed entirely in British West Samoa, the movie offers strikingly Technicolored views of the sea, the island and its people, swimming in their blue lagoon, climbing tall palms, and doing their intricately graceful Sasa, classical dance of Samoa. Unlike many other Hollywoodians at large in the South Seas, Director Mark Robson never permits his camera to leer at the native girls as if they were so many Dorothy Lamours, but tells the story with a simple directness that matches the islanders' disarming ways. And Composer Dimitri Tiomkin has written a haunting melody that should do as well as his High Noon theme on the juke boxes, even if it is not up to South Pacific.

*Although Hollywood's self-censoring production code specifically bars miscegenation.

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