The New Pictures

Beneath the Twelve-Mile Reef (20th Century-Fox) can possibly be explained as an attempt to present the Iliad in modern dress--dungarees, that is. The Greeks of the epic are the sponge fishermen of Tarpon Springs, Fla. The Trojans are the "Conchs," their Anglo-Saxon counterparts in Key West. After newsreeling through a sponge auction and a Greek Orthodox Epiphany, including the inevitable shot of Greek youths diving for a gold cross, the picture at last shows a little fight.

The Greeks sponge on the Conch sponging grounds. The Conchs steal the Greeks' catch. The Paris of the piece (Robert Wagner) then runs away with its Helen (Terry Moore), the daughter of the Big Conch himself. Together they go out to the diver-dreaded twelve-mile reef. The underwater photography here is pleasant, but hardly striking. However, the climactic fight with an octopus is staged well enough, and everything comes epically to an end with a line not even Homer could have written. Says Paris, by way of offering peace to Helen's father: "Don't be mad, Pop!"

The odd thing about all this folderol is that it may prove very popular. The huge CinemaScope screen floods the moviegoer with so much wonderful Florida sunshine that he is apt to sit back, happy as a grapefruit, and soak it up--ignoring the silly background babble of all those Hollywood tourists.

Miss Sadie Thompson (Columbia) is at least the third major screen version of the Somerset Maugham story about a missionary and a prostitute on a South Sea island. This one offers Rita Hayworth in the tart part made famous on the stage by Jeanne Eagels (Rain, 1922), and on the screen by Gloria Swanson (1928) and Joan Crawford (1932). Actress Hayworth adds no new luster to the old story.

To begin with, the studio made her job almost impossible by using a script that seems to have been prepared not by a writer but by a team of sanitation experts. Sadie is no longer a bad woman; she is just a hard-working girl who is wandering around the islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean looking for--what else?--a nightclub engagement. The U.S. marine, who in earlier productions made a somewhat simpler proposition, makes here an earnestly unconvincing proposal of marriage.

Rita tries hard, notably in the big scorch song, during which she wags the kind of pelvic semaphore that does not require a code expert to translate. But in the scenes of her conversion by the missionary (Jose Ferrer), she just looks confused--a condition that may be partly Actor Ferrer's fault. In his usual screen style, he tries so hard to give the impression that he is not acting that he doesn't.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.