The New Pictures

Boy on a Dolphin (20th Century-Fox). "For me," says Sophia Loren in her first Hollywood part, "plenty of money is enough." After this picture, Actress Loren will probably be able to write her own definition of plenty, and Hollywood will be glad to pay it.

Sophia is cast as an Aegean sponge diver. One day, as this Aphrodite rises dripping from the wave, her aphrodisian bosom is heaving with excitement. She has discovered a piece of ancient Greek sculpture--a golden boy on a bronze dolphin -- which has lain for 2,000 years on the floor of the Aegean. Sophia is determined to sell her discovery to the highest bidder, and before long an American archaeologist (Alan Ladd) and an American millionaire (Clifton Webb) are hard in pursuit of whatever it is that Sophia has.

A lot of pelagic piffle, of course, but the isles of Greece, in Milton Krasner's color photography, are as lovely as ever they were when the Nereids nested in their shoals. And although, as the archaeological hero, 43-year-old Actor Ladd wears a somewhat too convincing aura of antiquity, he at least manages to make the heroine look as if she can actually act. Not that it matters.

The Strange One (Horizon; Columbia) is the film version of End As a Man, a study of extracurricular activities at a Southern military academy, published in 1947 by Novelist Calder Willingham (who attended The Citadel in 1940). The movie may stimulate some furious second-thinking in many readers who (like James T. Farrell) thought that Willingham had made "a permanent contribution to American literature." With most of its sensationally fleshy parts removed, the bare-bones plot stands revealed as no more--and no less--than a cleverly constructed thriller.

The admission is the author's: it was Calder Willingham himself who wrote the screenplay--which in fact is carved out of the Broadway play that Willingham carved out of his novel in 1953. The film begins at the climax of the play with a magnificent instance of what writers call a "blind lead." The moviegoer is asked to swallow a veritable camel of complex motive and movement, and to swallow it in the dark. For half an hour, while a massive and subtle scheme of revenge takes form before his eyes, the moviegoer has almost no idea what is really going on. But the suspense of wondering and the fun of guessing and the horror of watching are so keen that the audience follows like a lamb to the ultimate slaughter.

The lago of this interlude is a cadet officer named Jocko De Paris (Ben Gazzara), a rising young sadist who has already learned that it is not enough to torture people--the real satisfaction comes when they can be made to beg for it. By an intricate series of Machiavellian maneuvers, De Paris involves four cadets, who think the whole sinister business is an almost innocent practical joke, in a plot. The idea is to siphon a mort of whisky through an enema nozzle into a fifth cadet and deposit his senseless body on the quadrangle one dark night. Next morning, when the boy is found and expelled from the academy for drinking on the campus. Jocko's hands are clean because so many others' are dirty; nobody dares to talk for fear of expulsion. After that, the camera watches with morbid fascination as the event, like an evil serpent, tumbles out coil after coil of consequences that ultimately crush the villain. His final lagonies make quite a spectacle.

In the course of this thoroughly distasteful affair, the spectator gets hardly a whiff of the shower-room sociology that permeated the book. He does learn a bit about what goes on inside a sadist--mostly, in this case, repressed homosexuality. Most of all, he gets a handsome introduction to two of Hollywood's most promising young men: Director Jack Garfein, 26, and Actor Ben Gazzara, 26, two products of Manhattan's Actors' Studio, who make their film debut with this picture. Garfein has directed the film more deftly than he staged the play on Broadway; he shows an impressive sense of story structure and scene timing, but rather less flair (in this film, at any rate) for the less intellectual aspects of the art--atmosphere and character. As for Gazzara. who made his Broadway reputation in End As a Man, A Hatful of Rain and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, this picture has already given him a Hollywood name as the most huggable heavy to come down the pike since Humphrey Bogart was young.

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