The New Pictures

Attack! (United Artists) pictures a blood-and-mud Bill Mauldin war without the saving grace of Mauldin's humor. A beat-up infantry company attached to a National Guard division is fighting its way across Belgium and taking heavy losses because of the cowardice of its captain (Eddie Albert). After one disastrous assault, Lieuts. Jack Palance and William Smithers turn mutinous, but are pacified when Battalion Commander Lee Marvin (who is protecting Eddie Albert to advance his own postwar political career back in the States) assures them that the company is being withdrawn from the front.

He is wrong, of course. The German breakthrough in the Ardennes requires that the company be flung into the breach. Captain Albert once more fails. The film ends in a woolly Walpurgisnacht in which Palance, after slaughtering quantities of Nazis, is ground into the mud by an enemy tank while Albert alternately cowers in bed and runs berserk with a submachine gun until finally shot dead in a cellar by Smithers, who then nobly surrenders to the MPs.

Based on Norman Brooks's unsuccessful 1954 Broadway play, Fragile Fox, the film has raised the hackles of the Defense Department, which considers it "derogatory to Army leadership during combat." A more serious charge is that the picture spends more time making melodrama than making sense. Even in its fighting, the dice are curiously loaded: the G.I.s are shown as tattered scarecrows on the edge of exhaustion in contrast to the spit-and-polish Nazis, who wear uniforms more appropriate to the parade ground than to combat. A similar imbalance flaws the plot. Smithers, though he has the courage to murder his captain, is earlier depicted as a man too irresolute to take command even when Eddie Albert is totally incapacitated by fear. The acting has the same black-and-white simplicity as the theme; it will be a long time, fortunately, before any movie displays such abject terror as that of Eddie Albert or such preposterous heroics as those of Jack Palance.

War and Peace (Paramount) probably has more right with it, and more wrong, than any film of recent years. As a super-colossal spectacle, costing $6,000,000, running 3^ hours, and employing a dozen topflight stars and some 8,000 extras, it rivals Gone With the Wind. But as a reflection of Tolstoy's absorbed peeling back of the contradictory layers of human nature, it is nearly valueless. In his tremendous novel, Tolstoy's characters are so alive that they seem more like family and friends than fictional creations. On the VistaVision screen, these same people are only too clearly actors more accustomed to sports shirts and pedal pushers than to the finery of igth century courts and camps.

Yet the film, as a film, is one of the industry's best. Visually, it could scarcely be improved. The Technicolor camera sweeps through Palladian palaces and country estates and catches pleasant fragments of the earthly paradise inhabited by Russia's landed gentry--the balls and hunts, the troika races and officers' revels. The duel between Pierre and Dolokhov is fought in a dawnlit forest where snow and awakening sky gleam with as many frosty gradations of white as a pearl fresh from the sea. When Pierre, a civilian at the front, hears the opening guns of the bloody concert at Borodino, he runs awkwardly along a hillside, trying to peer ahead through a tangle of shrubbery until at last he stops breathless on a vantage point. The camera becomes his dazzled eye as it reveals spread out before him the Russian lines and advanced batteries, then a wide, uptilted lift of plain, and finally, in the distance, the massed columns of the French moving into position with, beyond them, still more columns suggested by the exploding flashes of sun light on bayonets. Director King Vidor has a master's hand with the steady, drumbeat assault of infantry battalions and the wild, wind-whipped charge of cavalry. He is even better in tracing the terrible retreat of Napoleon's Grande Armee from Moscow as it drowns in mud, freezes stiff in blizzards, and curls like a dying snake across a winter landscape as desolate as the ninth ring of Hell.

But Director Vidor, unfortunately, must also deal with an involved story covering many lives and stretching across many years. Twenty hours of film would not be enough to do Tolstoy justice, and Vidor has less than four. The inevitable result is a telescoping of scenes and a hopscotching through the plot that scat ters attention from one leading character to another. The cast speaks in discordant accents, ranging from Cockney to Italian to Middle European to Middlewestern, and some of the most complex of Toltoy's people can only be hinted at: Dolokhov (Helmut Dantine) is a gutural swashbuckler; the eternal peasant, 'laton (John Mills), has time only for

few maxims (sample: "Where there is aw there is injustice") and then dies; he Machiavellian Prince Vassily (Tullio Jarminati) scarcely gets out of the wings, and the two men struggling for possession of Holy Russia, Kutuzov (Oscar Homolka) and Napoleon (Herbert Lorn), are seen simply as eccentrics--the one, an untidy, drowsy general; the other, a preening peacock who imagines he is an :agle.

Of the film's three stars, only Audrey Hepburn, with her precocious child's head set upon a swanlike neck, looks the part. She is perfectly the Natasha described by Tolstoy: "A dark-eyed little girl, plain, but full of life, with her wide mouth, her childish bare shoulders ... her black lair brushed back, her slender arms . . ." In her playing, Audrey catches the gamine qualities of Natasha, and her softness. What is lacking is the steely courage that would let Natasha brand her flesh with a red-hot iron to prove her love. Instead of a total commitment to life, there is more often a quiet acceptance of fate. Mel Ferrer's Prince Andrey has a certain sullen grandeur, but his diction is often unclear, and he is more wooden than reserved, more testy than proud. Henry Fonda's leanness at first seems all wrong for the massive, moonfaced, soul-tortured Pierre. But Fonda builds beautifully into his part, using a physical clumsiness as a counterpoise to his soaring spirit, making his rages seem the more terrible since they flash out from passivity. As he struggles for the answers to the great questions (Why does a man live? Why does he kill? Who owns his loyalty?), Fonda acts to the very limit of his considerable powers, and sometimes gives the impression of being the only man in the huge cast who has read the book.

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