The New Pictures

Animal Farm (Louis de Rochemont Associates). George Orwell's political fable, the famous animallegory about Communism, has been rendered as an animated cartoon, at feature length (75 minutes), by a team of 100 artists, working in Britain under the direction of John Halas, a Hungarian, and his wife Joy Batchelor. It was three years in the making--more than 300,000 colored drawings are assembled in the final print--and it has been made, in all technical respects, quite as good as good Disney. In every other sense the picture is about as remote from Mickey Mouse as Moscow is from Hollywood.

The story holds pretty true to Orwell. Manor Farm is run by a drunken brute named Jones. One day the animals, incited by a wise old Middle White boar, revolt and drive Jones out. The pigs, being the most intelligent of the animals, assume the leadership of a communal democracy based on the precept: All Animals Are Equal. The most prominent pigs are Snowball and Napoleon. Napoleon drives Snowball off the farm and seizes absolute power. As time goes by, the pigs get to look more and more like people until at last, as Orwell put it, "it was impossible to say which was which."

Orwell wrote in the reverse English of the ironist: when he is most grim he reads most gay, and such laughter is a Jason's shield against the Medusa he is facing. In the movie all sense of humor is discarded, and the audience is asked to look the Soviet horror square in the eye. The film, in short, is a shocker that demands not customers but a sort of resolutely determined suicide squad.

All the same. Animal Farm is an important film, and intensely interesting to see. The voices of the animals, all spoken by Maurice Denham, are wonderfully satisfying. And Matyas Seiber's rousing anthem, Beasts of England--in which Imitator Denham sings a dozen voices at once, a roaring chorus of many sound tracks blended into one--is a proletarian hymn ("Something," as Orwell imagined, "between Clementine and La Cucuracha") that can make the most conservative heart go pitapat.

The sum of these virtues is, moreover, a greater virtue. They demonstrate what Disney's dominance in the field has made moviemakers as well as moviegoers forget: that the animated film is not necessarily a subdivision of slapstick. Though one or two U.P.A. cartoons have suggested the possibility, Halas and Batchelor prove with this picture that animation can cope with serious subjects as well as with slight ones. Next H. & B. production: a feature treatment of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.

Bad Day at Black Rock (MGM) starts Metro off on the New Year with its best footage forward. It is a tight film, told in quiet words and simple pictures that give it an uncommon quality of economy.

The town of Black Rock is a miserable-looking shamble of buildings straddling a strip of railroad tracks on a southwestern plain. One sunny morning in 1945, the Santa Fe streamliner pulls up at Black Rock with a screech that sounds like trouble. The one man to alight is John J. MacReedy (Spencer Tracy), a robust fellow despite his game left arm. MacReedy is looking for an old Japanese farmer who ran a small place on a nearby rocky slope. The farmer's son saved MacReedy's life in the Italian campaign, and MacReedy carries with him the son's posthumous medal. But wherever he turns for help, MacReedy meets the distrusting, sun-and-sand-beaten faces of five or six townsmen; they do not yet know the stranger's mission, nor are they eager for him to discover that in a fit of distorted patriotic fervor combined with jealousy and just plain meanness, they have burned out the Japanese farmer's shack and killed him. And all they want is for MacReedy to get out of town.

But John J. MacReedy is a patient man and a thorough one. In fact, he appears to accept the snarling opposition of the villains with placidity, and shrewdly allows himself to be buffeted about by their cold-war tactics. Still, when the showdown comes, MacReedy singlehandedly--with judo and some other efficient, war-schooled tricks--mauls them down. And it is a tribute to Director John Sturges that when Bad Day blasts out with violence, the audience is ready--in fact, rooting--for it. For a change, CinemaScope and color go beyond merely recording pretty scenery in wide-open spaces. Cameraman William C. Mellor composed some topnotch shots (reminiscent of the paintings of the Southwest's Peter Kurd) of hardy, blue-jeaned men smoldering idly as if they were as much a part of the dusty brown floor of their town as the yellow sun.

Practically the whole cast is first-rate. As a conscience-stricken, whisky-soaked sheriff, Dean Jagger shows what it means to waver on the drink; Lee Marvin is alarmingly mean as a steely, easygoing plotter, and so is tough-guy Ernest Borgnine. Robert Ryan as the chief villain has some fine scenes with Spencer Tracy, who is at his best.

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