The New Pictures

Folly To Be Wise (Launder-Gilliat; Fine Arts Films). Whatever will become of the British drawing-room comedy now that hardly anybody can afford a drawing room? Folly To Be Wise, though it sometimes laughs a little too hard at its own joke, makes an amusing suggestion: use the same cast of characters, but turn the plot into a quiz show.

Enter the bustling chaplain (Alastair Sim), rubbing his -hands. "Brrfssk! Ah! What have we here?" He has, for his first assignment as a World War II entertainment officer, a British army camp. The troops, he soon discovers, would rather have a pint at the village pub than enjoy the weekly entertainment provided for them by a group of patriotic ladies known as the May Savitt Qualthrop String Quartet. The daring chaplain decides to compromise and give the boys a local talent quiz show.

In from the wings he calls a cast that looks as if it had been waiting there since Wycherley's last play folded. "My dear Lady Dodds" (Martita Hunt), a magnificent, antique iron doe, is followed on stage by Dr. McAdam (Miles Malleson), a lovable, bumbling country practitioner. The local "artist" (Roland Culver) is also there, and the artist's wife (Elizabeth Allan). The wife's lover (Colin Gordon), a big doublethink expert on the BBC, and the local Labor M.P. (Edward Chapman) complete the ambitious chaplain's board of experts.

Experts they are, at mugging if not at answering questions. From the moment somebody asks, "Is marriage a good idea?" the show falls gloriously apart. The artist and his wife's lover start by disagreeing about marriage in general, end by discussing their own particular situations in front of the enlisted personnel. Everything ends in a good, low brawl. Final shot: the chastened chaplain, a week later, seated primly in his empty auditorium, listening to the efforts of the May Savitt Qualthrop String Quartet.

The Wild One (Stanley Kramer; Columbia) is a percussion piece played on the moviegoer's nerves, a kind of audiovisual fugue in which the themes of boogie and terror heap up in alternations of juke-yowl and gear-gnash to a climax of violence--and then fall patly silent, leaving the audience to console its disordered pulse and unsweat itself from the seat.

The picture begins with the drum roar of motorcycle motors, as 30 or more of them pound over a highway between the crazy young legs of a bop-sent, trouble-hungry "sickle club" of teen-age boys. Pacing the pack is Marlon Brando, the wild one of the title, an actor whose sullen face, slurred accents and dream-drugged eye have made him a supreme portrayer of morose juvenility. The motorized wolves burst into the small town of Wrightsville, stack their machines along the curb, and pile into the local saloon to look for some action. They get it, and so does Wrightsville. The audience sits frozen with a growing horror as the abscess of violence swells and swells until the watcher almost cries out for it to burst and be done with. It bursts all right. Before the day and night are over, the young toughs have commandeered the tavern, wrecked a beauty parlor, broken into the jail, kidnaped and terrorized a young girl (Mary Murphy), and (although by accident) killed an old man. In the end, they ride off with no worse than a severe tongue-lashing from a county sheriff.

The script makes a couple of pious passes at pointing a moral; it says that the community--the greedy tavernkeeper, a weak cop, some hotheaded and vicious citizens--is as much to blame for what happens as the young delinquents are, but it is hard to believe in such talk.

The effect of the movie is not to throw light on a public problem but to shoot adrenalin through the moviegoer's veins.

The movies have always accepted the notion that violence was its own excuse for being; they have said the same of love, too, and of holiness, and even sometimes of beauty--especially if it happened to appear in a female form. And yet, while Hollywood's expressions of love and holiness and beauty have remained in general on a level little above childishness, its methods of showing violence have evolved in adult and subtle variety.

The Wild One has the disturbing shock of reality (it is based on The Cyclists' Raid by Frank Rooney, about a gang of motorcycle hoodlums operating in California in 1949), but its main purpose seems to be to shock. No one can doubt that the movies are highly skillful at picturing brutality and violence, but The Wild One suggests that Hollywood may be making too much of a bad thing.

All the Brothers Were Valiant

(MGM) is the same salt solution, give or take a pinch, that the movie public has been contentedly gargling since Mutiny on the Bounty (1935). There are Robert Taylor and the usual miniature whale, the mutiny on the blood-slopped foredeck, the bad harpooner called Silva. the nice native girl (Betta St. John) and the sunken treasure--in this case so palpably a ball bearing that audiences may wonder why all the actors believe it to be a large black pearl.

The story tells what happens to some swine among whom the pearl is cast. Mostly, they kill each other to get it, but nobody does get it, because Stewart Granger, the last man left alive, has to run away from hostile natives, leaving the pearl at the bottom of a lagoon. Later he tries to persuade his brother, Captain Taylor, master of a whaling ship, to sail back and raise the treasure. When the captain refuses, Granger steals both Taylor's ship and his wife (Ann Blyth).

Since this movie has been made so often, it is curious that Hollywood cannot at least make it well. The long pearl-fishing flashback puts a potbelly on the middle of the film that never wears off. Actor Granger, admirably suited to British drawing-room movies, is badly miscast. And the derring-duo, Taylor and Actress Blyth, seem, in their big storm scene, while all the screen rocks wildly, as beautiful, as smilingly unperturbed and as lifeless as a manikin couple in a sporting-goods-store window.

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