The New Pictures

The Prodigal (MGM) is one more Biblical exegesis by the box office theologians of Hollywood. A freewheeling, full-color CinemaScopic plunge into the anachronistic past, the film is based on the parable of the prodigal son according to St. Luke, but the scenario is jazzed up with additional story by a trio of latter-day prophets (Maurice Zimm, Joe Breen Jr., Samuel James Larsen).

Prodigal gets off winging as fun-loving Micah (Edmund Purdom) and sober-minded brother Joram (John Dehner) come galloping hell-for-leather down the main street of Joppa; with true Hollywood ingenuity, they are using stirrups a good 600 years before they were invented. Despite his Old Testament beard and striped gown, Micah leaves no doubt as to his Anglo-Saxon manliness. Before a moviegoer can say popcorn, he has unhorsed a villainous overseer and released from bondage a mistreated slave; later on, he triumphs in a religious disputation with some rascally heathens by a solid right to the jaw.

That night, Micah drops in on a traveling tent show to sneer at the worshipers of the pagan gods, Astarte and Baal. But one gander at luscious Lana Turner, High Priestess of Astarte, and Micah is aquiver.

He gallops back to the family ranch, jilts his girl, demands his inheritance from his patriarchal father (Walter Hampden), and hits the trail for Damascus, lusting after alien goddesses.

Things really warm up in the big city.

Micah has an unnerving encounter with the Astarte Missionary Society--hundreds of wide-awake young girls who live in tiny pavilions in the Garden of Love and hold intimate midnight conversations behind closed curtains with prospective converts. It becomes increasingly clear that the worship of Astarte (Hollywood version) is the direct ancestor of present-day burlesque: High Priestess Lana, wearing as few beads as the Production Code, will permit, promenades along a runway above her audience, using every classic nuance of the stripteaser's hesitation walk while, as comedy relief, High Priest Louis Calhern lurches onstage in a funny hat and baggy costume, just like an oldtime Dutch comic at Minsky's.

Once Micah has snatched his night of love with Lana, Director Richard Thorpe winds things up with the required doses of remorse, retribution and forgiveness. Lana gets burned up--literally, Calhern gets a knife in the throat, and Micah contentedly trades the fleshpots of Damascus for an entree of veal back home.

Hiroshima (EastWest Films; Continental) is amateurishly photographed, badly edited and stuffed with propaganda.

Yet, even with all these strikes against it, the movie is well worth seeing.

Filmed in 1953 by fellow-traveling Director Hideo Sekigawa, produced by the then Communist-run Japanese Teachers Union, and acted by dozens of A-bomb survivors who offered their services free, Hiroshima originally contained so many gruesome horrors and so anti-American a line that Japan's Education Ministry protested. No reputable distributor would agree to handle it, and the left-wing company that finally took it over has since gone bankrupt.

About 15 minutes has been cut from the U.S. version, mostly scenes that the distributors felt were too strong for Western audiences, but also including most of the footage devoted to one of the two Hiroshima families the film is about. As a result, the movie begins with one family and then bewilderingly switches to another for the balance of the film.

Hiroshima opens with the convincing bustle of a modern city (1945 pop. 300,000) on a wartime footing. There are patriotic rallies of students and workers, addressed by imperial demagogues shrilling defiance of the U.S. One fine shot has a gnomelike Japanese officer scurrying like a wound-up toy down the serried ranks of listeners to slap the face of an inattentive girl. Then the camera moves to the inti mate scenes of family breakfasts, children going hand-in-hand to school, shops opening for the day, a crowded trolley car rounding a curve on a busy street.

Faintly, the distant hum of a plane penetrates the city noises. Some workers pause at their jobs. Faces turn toward the 6-29?" morning The sky. A answer child is a says: flicker of "Isn't light, that a as sharp and transitory as a flashbulb. Then chaos. In this chilling moment of catastrophe, of dust swirls and smoke and col lapsing buildings, of anarchic, suddenly stretching silence, the film justifies itself.

Beneath the sky-filling mushroom cloud, the camera recreates (through both news clips and studio shots) the debris-scattered plain that was once a living city. The first dazed survivors are staggering to their feet, the trapped and injured cry feebly, flames light up the midday darkness. Fleeing the fire, a horde of the singed and maimed pour down to the rivers that wind through Hiroshima. Some sing and sway in a monotone chorus; others lose their grip on neighbors and drift away on the current. In the shattered hospitals, beds and floors are covered with the wounded. A victim asks, almost without curiosity: "Do they intend to keep us alive or kill us?"

From this inferno, the movie makes a jump of seven years, and the telling gets diffuse and clumsy. There are still a few good scenes, as when a group of beggar children solemnly practice the incantation that wins chocolate bars from G.I.s: "You gentlemen, please, no papa, no mama . . . hungry." But the pacifist message (the hero quits his job when the factory where he is employed begins making shells) is too trifling an anticlimax to the holocaust that has gone before. If the shuddering cataclysm of the A-bomb has not made the antiwar message clear, no amount of moralizing can.

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