The New Pictures

Lisbon (Republic) boasts one of the year's most sadistic openings: Super-Criminal Claude Rains begins his morning by scattering crumbs on his windowsill, then brains one of the feeding songbirds with a tennis racket and hands it to his cat for breakfast. Besides birds and cats, Claude's posh villa is equipped with an English butler, an Iberian cutthroat (Francis Lederer), a bevy of nubile females who soothe his cares with piano solos and poetry readings. He also employs Smuggler Ray Milland, "who is a criminal too, but a nice one, since he is in the racket only for excitement, and disapproves of murder and dope addiction.

Rains's current caper is a $250,000 job for Maureen O'Hara, who has flown into Lisbon to find help in rescuing her industrialist husband from behind the Iron Curtain. But instead of getting on with the story, everyone stands around and talks. Ray tells Maureen how his divorced wife deceived him; Maureen tells Ray why she married a rich old man, and Yvonne Furneaux explains why she joined Claude's harem ("I have known destitution"), and laments that she isn't as pure as on her confirmation day.

Director Ray Milland was able to arrange it for Leading Man Ray Milland to be endlessly pursued by the women in the picture. Maureen, after nuzzling with Ray in her hotel room, visiting historic Sintra and going for a ride in his speedboat, is so enraptured that she offers Rains $1,000,000 to deliver her husband dead so that she can inherit his vast fortune and buy Ray a new boat. And spirited Yvonne keeps sneaking out of the seraglio to sigh against Ray's shoulder and warn him to be careful. Ray has scarcely time left over to retrieve the missing husband, dispose of Badman Lederer, spurn Maureen, see Rains led off to jail, and walk into the blue dawn with lovely, cat-eyed Yvonne.

Away All Boats (Universal) continues Hollywood's reverent chronicling of World War II. This time the cameras are trained with documentary fidelity on the U.S.S. Belinda, an attack transport manned by the customary horde of landlubbers who have to be whipped into shape by a handful of old salts. All of the characters are so simply drawn that it might have been more convenient to hang labels about their necks: Jeff Chandler is the Good,

Grey Commander; George Nader, the Embittered Subordinate; Lex Barker, the Soft Socialite Hardened by War; William Reynolds, the Callow Youth Who Matures; Don Keefer, the Officer Who Goes to Pieces. Also present are the Good Padre, the Heroic Doctor, the Pugnacious Irishman and the Expectant Father.

What makes the film worth seeing is the wholehearted cooperation of the U.S. Navy, which allowed the cast and cameramen aboard for its 1955 operation in the Caribbean when some 200 ships and 10,000 Marines joined in the largest-scale amphibious maneuvers in history. With the aid of clips from combat film, the details of training, the assaults on Jap-held islands, the rescue missions and the chilling kamikaze attacks off Okinawa are brought vividly to life. Not so effective are the inevitable flashbacks to civilian life and love, featuring Julie Adams.

Fruits of Summer (Ellis Films) is standard French farce. It establishes its point of view early when 18-year-old, unmarried Etchika Choureau tells her mother she is pregnant. "Well," says mother Edwige Feuillere cheerfully, "the situation isn't too serious.'' Her plan: to go to the country with Etchika and then pretend that the baby is her own. Her problem: to lure her stuffy, disaffected husband (Henri Guisol) into bed so he will not deny paternity. Naturally, this requires a good deal of racing in and out of bedrooms in various stages of undress, and the action stops dead only for a double take or a double entendre. Etchika and Edwige are worth looking at even when what they have to say is not worth listening to.

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