The New Pictures

Somebody Up There Likes Me (MGM) is the sort of Lower Depths that Maxim Gorky might have written had he been born a 20th century American and learned philosophy from Dr. Norman Vincent Peale. Based on the "autobiography" of ex-Middleweight Champion Rocky Graziano (as ghosted by Sportswriter Rowland Barber), the film begins and ends with a treacly title song ("Yes! Somebody up there likes me; Whatever betide me. he'll comfort and guide me, And stand beside me right or wrong . . .") throbbingly delivered by Singer Perry Como.

But when the film gets away from its cozy palship with God, it generates a Gorkian power in chronicling the rise and fall and rise again of a grade-A juvenile delinquent from Manhattan's Lower East Side. It also gives a merited big chance to Actor Paul Newman, 31. who seemed doomed to walk forever in the shadow of Marlon Brando. Newman is still chock full of Brando mannerisms--the animal clumsiness,'mumbled speech and hunched shoulders--and he shambles through his scenes as precariously upright as a dancing bear. But there is strength in everything he does, and his occasional tenderness with wife Pier Angeli or his racked mother (Eileen Heckart) is as compelling as his berserk rage against strangers.

As soon as he is old enough to get into real trouble. Graziano begins to ricochet between a cluttered cold-water flat and a series of reformatories, pens and Army prisons. Out of jail, he leads his gang of rocks on street forays--stripping tires from parked cars, hijacking trucks, reaching through tenement windows to steal radios, breaking open subway coin machines. In the hands of the police, he is the classic tough. He spits on the floor of the warden's office, grinds out a cigarette on a psychiatrist's hand, gives a careless guard a knee in the groin. At home, he wars with his besotted father (Harold J. Stone); abroad, he talks with his fists.

The fists prove his salvation when a penetrating instructor shows him how to "make hate work for him." In the prize ring, Graziano remains an undisciplined, roughhouse fighter, but now society applauds instead of imprisoning him. The habit of trouble is not broken. He misses scheduled bouts, tangles with gamblers and boxing commissions. Before he meets Tony Zale for the championship, newspapers break the story that Rocky had been dishonorably discharged from the Army for belting an officer.

The film suggests that the headlines were enough to make Rocky think seriously of making a deal with the crooked gamblers, only to be dissuaded by a pep talk from his neighborhood candy-store proprietor and by a fortuitous reconciliation with his father. Somebody ends with Rocky knocking out Zale in a bloody six rounds, but neglects to mention his subsequent run-ins with various boxing commissions or his recent triumphs as a high-paid TV star on NBC's Martha Raye Show, where he plays Martha's lowbrowed but highhearted suitor.

Paul Newman brings to awesome life the jungle qualities implicit in a slum childhood: Harold Stone, as his father, seems like a Neanderthal survivor blinking in the sun at the entrance of his cave, and Eileen Heckart adds a wire-thin hysteria to the role of the mother. Newman's nearly wordless courtship of Pier Angeli has been pleasantly drawn by Writer Ernest Lehman and Director Robert Wise. Only the film's religious theme is seriously off key. Somebody up there doubtless likes Rocky. But his film biographers obviously did not know what to make of it, end by being merely embarrassing about the 'whole thing.

La Strada (Ponti-De Laurentiis; Trans-Lux) is a sad-sweet little fable that introduces Giulietta Masina. a wonderfully fey Italian actress with something in her of both Imogene Coca and Stan Laurel, and with something more: a vernal innocence that is as ageless as it is rare.

Giulietta is a cheerful halfwit, sold by her mother to Anthony Quinn. a carnival strong man who travels about Italy in a motorcycle trailer. The loutish strong man has only one trick, breaking an iron chain by expanding his chest. He uses Giulietta as his daytime slavey and nighttime consolation, and she forgives him everything except his brutish indifference. Mostly, she is happy because each day brings them someplace new, where Giulietta can absorbedly examine people, the sky, the road, the washing on a line. She delights in small accomplishments: banging a tambourine, blowing six notes on a trumpet, learning ten lines of dialogue in a hopelessly dismal comedy sketch. Each triumph is enough to make her strut in small-boy pleasure.

They join a circus, and Giulietta watches wide-eyed as a mischievous acrobat (Richard Basehart) baits her surly companion. At the high point of Quinn's act, just as he is about to burst the chain asunder, Basehart comes loping into the ring to say: "You're wanted on the telephone." It is the eternal war of the joyously mad on the brutally strong. In this war Anthony Quinn is always defeated. Just as he is about to grasp his tormentor, he trips. When he pulls a knife, he is arrested.

Freed from jail, Quinn finds Giulietta patiently waiting. Without a word they take to the road again and, on a lonely stretch, encounter Basehart changing a tire. In a cold fury Quinn beats him to death and disguises the murder as an accident. But he has lost again. The murder is written for him to see, every day, in Giulietta's eyes. She whines, rocks dolorously, shrinks from him like a whipped dog. Finally, he abandons her and goes on his way alone. Years later, he learns that she has died, and he crawls down to the sea to howl his despair. A blend of myth and surrealism, the film is a beautifully told allegory--of innocence and the artist and the brute--in which no one wins.

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