The New Pictures

Something of Value (M-G-M), unlike Robert Ruark's bloody bestseller about the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya (TIME, May 2, 1955), makes an intelligent effort to live up to its title. After Director Richard Brooks (The Blackboard Jungle) arrived in Africa to start the cameras rolling, he found himself in sharp disagreement with the facts as Columnist Ruark gave them in his novel (for which the studio had paid a whopping $300,000), and so he rewrote the film's script. The result of the rewriting has its moments of bwanality, but most of the time, hacking economic short cuts and avoiding partisan deadfalls, it guides the moviegoer efficiently through a tropical tangle of greed and politics, cruelty and superstition that winds inextricably back to Drake and Cecil, back to Ham and Japhet.

The film tells a tale of two friends, a white man (Rock Hudson) and a black (Sidney Poitier), and through them tells both sides of the Kenya story. Outraged by white tyranny and black suffering, the black man heads for the hills and those who feel as he does, that the white man must be driven out so that the black man can call his land and his soul his own. "We are not children any more," he cries at his friend. "So we are not friends any more." But once among the Mau Mau, the black man finds that he detests their mindless cruelty almost as much as he hates the arrogance of the settlers. Nevertheless, he convinces himself that for the sake of his people he must take the oath; he even takes part in the slaughter of people he has known and loved all his life. In time he becomes a big man in the Mau Mau, but the higher he gets the more he doubts that violence will bring anything but violence.

Meanwhile, the white man of the story has not only been fighting the Mau Mau. He has been battling with the extremists among his own people, with the white Mau Mau who answer torture with torture and murder with murder, and imagine they can see the future of Africa through a gun sight. In the end, the extremists win. as they did in historical fact, and the black hero is killed in a fight with the white. Nevertheless, the picture concludes on a note of hope that the whole gruesome affair may really be a birth pang, a painful prelude to a new and better Africa.

This Could Be the Night (MGM) demonstrates the advantages of a college education. The heroine (Jean Simmons), a graduate of Smith, takes a part-time secretarial job in a nightclub, and when she displays her sheepskin the wolves pounce--with a difference. To begin with, they all stop swearing. The proprietor of the club (Paul Douglas) trades in his occupational zoot for a suave grey flannel from Brooks Brothers. The busboy cracks down on his algebra. The boy on the bass, according to one close observer, modestly refrains from plucking the G string. The hero (Anthony Franciosa), who has been running the joint with one hand and kitzeling cuties with the other, suddenly finds himself going to bed with a good book. Sex, in fact, is so emphatically snooted that the stripper (Neile Adams) enters a cooking contest. Moral: don't bump, grind.

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