The New Pictures

Secrets of Life (Buena Vista), like all the rest of Walt Disney's nature films, is everything the eye could wish, but rather more than the ear can bear. The music sounds like a sneak attack on Debussy by MacNamara's band, and the commentary reads like a TV pitch for nature's way, spelled backwards. Yet across the screen there moves in lustrous color a beautifully photographed freak show. At its best, it is popular science at not very far from its best.

The Disney presentation, of course, is far more popular than scientific, with no more method than the afternoon of a faun. One instant the camera is following the progress of a paramecium as it scoots through the heavy microscopic traffic. A few frames later the moviegoer may find himself staring at a luminous line of what seem to be huge purple carboys filled with a red-gold fluid and hanging in a rack, but prove to be vastly bloated ants--the living storage vats of the honey-cask tribe. There is some marvelous stop-motion cinematography. Roots grow like wild white worms before the watcher's eyes. Gourds bulge, flowers bloom, tomatoes blush. Best of all are the scenes of underwater life. The archer fish, with fearful accuracy, spits liquid arrows several feet into the air, and bags a butterfly for dinner. The angler fish, looking like nothing but a clump of seaweed, sprouts a fishing pole from its nose, and dangles a tempting piece of built-in bait before a passing mullet. Conclusion: mullet into gullet like a bullet.

The Mountain (Paramount) is a fairly interesting attempt to combine in one picture a hit and a myth. Based on the 1953 novel by France's Henri Troyat, which in turn was suggested by a 1950 plane crash in the Alps, The Mountain tells the story of an adventure that leads its adventurers to the high places of the spiritual as well as of the physical world. The adventure is intended to represent the struggle between Good and Evil, as that struggle is lived out against a symbol that expresses both the way and the goal of life: The Mountain. All too often, though, the makers of this movie give evidence that they are hardly the men to match The Mountain.

Good is represented by a simple-minded old shepherd (Spencer Tracy), the only man ever to climb The Mountain alone (actually the Aiguille du Midi, near Chamonix in the French Alps, where the location shots were made). Evil is the younger brother (Robert Wagner) whom the shepherd, in the absence of a midwife, "brought into the world with his own hands." When a plane rumored to be carrying gold crashes on top of The Mountain just as winter is setting in, little brother begs big brother to guide him up the mountain so that he can loot the plane, and the passengers too. Big brother indignantly refuses. "You want to go up The Mountain, within the sight of God, so that you can pick the pockets of dead people?" Nevertheless, when little brother threatens to go alone, big brother decides to do for love what he would not do for money. In the language of symbol: Good would never have got going if it had not been for Evil.

The climb begins, and the hour that.follows is devoted to an eye-thrilling, hair-raising pictorial essay on mountain climbing that should teach all sensible people everything they need to know about the Alpinist's art: stay home. At the summit, where symbols lurk behind every boulder like so many Abominable Snowmen, the story comes to a climax that is meant to be as bare and violent as the peak itself.

Somehow, it isn't. Even though Actor Tracy, who is often excellent as the Old Man of the Mountain, labors mightily to drag the film to the necessary emotional altitude, it keeps slipping back on him. Director Edward Dmytryk often seems to want nothing more in the film than a good action story and a little local color. He gets the one, but as for the other, this picture's portrayal of life in an Alpine village has more holes in it than an Emmental cheese.

The Girl He Left Behind (Warner), adapted from the novel by Marion (See Here, Private Hargrove) Hargrove, is a salute to the U.S. Army. Hero Tab Hunter's version of that salute brings his thumb sharply to his nose. Tab is a lean-jawed, crew-cut all-American boy who is dedicated to the art of doing nothing gracefully while warding off the hot breath of the draft. But when his girl (Natalie Wood) begins dodging him because he is dodging the draft, Tab loses his grip. Before he can recover, he is at the tail end of an Army physical examination, and a psychiatrist is asking, "Do you like girls?" Replies a glum Tab, "Of course, but do we have time?" They do not. All Tab wants from the Army is his discharge, especially when a sergeant, winningly played by Murray Hamilton, displays concern for Tab's character: "When that whistle blows in the morning, I want you all to get up eager. I want you to look bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready for the day. I want everybody to stand tall . . . But if you screw up around here, your behinds will be grass, and I will be the lawn mower." From golden boy to goldbrick is a short step for Tab, but the road back is long and steep for the audience.

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