The New Pictures

Aida (Sol Hurok; I.F.E.). Italian film makers have released eight filmed operas to U.S. art houses in the past seven years. Some of them translated into fairly acceptable films. Aida, with its vivid Ferraniacolor, its monumental settings of ancient Memphis, its popular and dramatic music, its handsome acting cast and its standout (mostly invisible) singing cast, aims at being the grandest assault yet on U.S. eyes and ears.

But in Aida, the eyes have it. Lest any of the plot be lost between the music and the Italian language, a discreet narrator explains each scene before it starts. Aida (Sophia Loren) is a slant-eyed, dusky-skinned, full-lipped Ethiopian slave girl in the Egyptian court. She and the stone-faced princess (Lois Maxwell) are in love with a weak-mouthed warrior named Radames (Luciano della Marra). Radames is sent off to trounce the Ethiopians and is rewarded, all against his will, with the hand of the princess. Torn between love and guilt, he slips Aida a top-secret battle plan. He is nabbed and both are left to die in the well-lit dungeons beneath the city while dancing girls posture on the floor above.

Composer Giuseppe Verdi, who discovered Egypt some 80 years ahead of Hollywood, set the yarn to some of the finest music ever to come out of Italy. Director Clemente Fracassi has put it in the mouths of Top Singers Renata Tebaldi, Ebe Stignani and Giuseppe Campora (with supporting singers from La Scala and the Rome Opera). He has had his visible actors synchronize their lips and slow-motion movements with the music. Unfortunately, his $3,000,000 budget apparently made no allowances for up-to-date recording equipment. Too often Aida rasps and burbles as though it were being played on a windup phonograph with a rusty needle--and another low blow is dealt to grand opera.

Track of the Cat (Wayne-Fellows; Warner). In his novel about a catamount chase, Walter Van Tilburg Clark suggested that the evil his characters do stalks after them in the form of a black panther. On the screen, an actor comes right out and mutters hollowly that the panther "is the evil in everybody."

On that A-B-C symbolic level, when the panther eats up some Good Instincts (cows), a sort of back-country Cain (Robert Mitchum) and his Abel-type brother (William Hopper) set forth to slay the beast. Abel dies beneath the Tree of Life and Cain also turns up his toes. But a third brother (Tab Hunter) puts a bullet in the panther, and just at that instant the sun breaks through a cloud, transfiguring him into something painfully like the Better Life.

All this is doled out as solemnly as a lantern-slide lecture in German philosophy, with the actors uneasily unsure whether they are really U.S. dirt farmers, by cracky, or Leibnitzian particles in a transcendental ether. The color is excellent, though it is not clear why color is needed; the exterior shots are mostly of snowscapes marked with black exclamations of pine, and the interiors are in starkest black and white (Good v. Evil). To suggest, perhaps, the eternal travail of these opposites, the picture has been made as eternal as possible (102 minutes). When at last the moviegoer dares hope it will end, one of the characters looks him square in the eye and announces: "There's a grave to dig yet."

Desiree (20th Century-Fox) is the $4,000,000 CinemaScope tribute to Napoleon based on Annemarie Selinko's 1953 bestselling oo-la-la, which takes Marlon Brando out of his blue jeans and jams him, literally and esthetically, into Empire . tights. It takes all the Brando talent to avoid looking like Stanley Kowalski at the Beaux Arts Ball. The script tells the story of Napoleon's first love, the daughter of a wealthy merchant in Marseille. Napoleon is an ambitious young general without a command who asks for Desiree (Jean Simmons) in marriage and for her money in advance. With her cash in hand, he buys a ticket to Paris and gets engaged to Josephine. Is Desiree downhearted? Pouf! She nabs herself one of Napoleon's best generals, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte (Michael Rennie), who becomes Crown Prince of Sweden, makes her his Crown Princess.

After that the film turns into something like a tour of the wax museum: every two minutes another famous historical event. The tableaux rush by so fast that there is hardly time to realize how magnificently they are dressed. Napoleon's coronation, for instance, in ermine and blood-crimson, sky-blue and gold, is a piece of braggart beautification intended, it would appear, to prove that Fox can put on a better show than the British Commonwealth. In between the state oc casions, Actress Simmons wanders through palace after palace, wearing a country-mouse look that seems to say, "Gee! All this History and poor little me!"

Marlon Brando is the only principal who shows enough histrionic personality to overpower the overpowering costumes. Not that he really plays Napoleon: the Selinko version of the great dictator does not ask that. But he beetles his brows and pots his belly in the manner of the official portraits; and to avoid a vocal dissonance with the rest of the cast, he even achieves a slight British accent.

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