The New Pictures

No Time for Sergeants (Warner), adapted from a Broadway hit adapted from a 1954 bestseller, is a sometimes hilarious little Parable of the Willing Draftee--the story of the horrible things that can occur when one good apple happens to get into the barrel.

The barrel in this case is the U.S. Air Force, and Will Stockdale (Andy Griffith) is a pippin. The hillbilly is so dumb he thinks R.O.T.C. is a disease; but he like to bust, he's that crazy about "thuh Ayuh Fowerce." After his first visit to the mess hall, he happily hollers, "Nevah had sech a fill a beans in mah whole lahf!"

A couple of days of good Will, and the training sergeant (Myron McCormick), a man prepared for almost anything but affection, has been almost killed with kindness. Desperate, he decides to fit the round peg in a round hole. Though regulations forbid such cruel and unusual punishments, the sergeant secretly assigns Will as "P.L.O.--Permanent Latrine Orderly." "P.L.O.!" gasps Will, "Oh, thank you, sir." And he proceeds to prove himself such an orderly orderly that the captain compliments him on the condition of the latrine. Will allows that most of the credit belongs to the sergeant who--"He what!" the captain roars, and by the time the tumult has subsided, the sergeant is "a 45-year-old private" who does not respond to Will's heartfelt sympathy.

So it goes--when it goes. But all too often under Mervyn Le Roy's dull-as-drill direction, the gallus humor does not snap, the slapstick does not slap. And pretty soon the moviegoer begins to wonder why he ever got into this man's Air Force.

God's Little Acre (Security Pictures; United Artists) is a literary locale in the moral sump at the dead end of Tobacco Road, and Novelist Erskine Caldwell mucked about in it so merrily that his novel has sold more than 8,000,000 copies in 25 years. Cleaned up for the cinema public, Caldwell's Acre still contains enough rich, smelly dirt to grow a mort of the sort of lettuce Hollywood loves best.

"There was a mean trick played on us somewhere," sighs Ty Ty Walden (Robert Ryan), the back-country bumpkin who is the picture's hero. "God put us in the bodies of animals and tried to make us act like people." Ty Ty himself is all too human. For 15 years, instead of plowing his fields, he has spent his working hours digging them full of enormous holes in a sleeveless search for legendary treasure. And every time he digs in "God's Little Acre," the plot whose yield he has allotted to his church, Ty Ty reluctantly but firmly gives the Lord a less desirable piece of ground. "God's a big man," Ty Ty reasons. "He don't mind where I put his share long as he gets it."

Supported on such lofty principles, Ty Ty sometimes simply cannot understand how the rest of his family can be so beastly. His daughter Dahlin' Jill (Fay Spain) is the sort of Georgia peach that any man can pluck--and several do. His daughter-in-law Griselda (played by Tina Louise, the Appassionata von Climax of Broadway's Li'l Abner) plays her most important role in the hay with her brother-in-law (Aldo Ray), an event that, for one quaint reason or another, gives the fellow's wife almost as much satisfaction as it gives Griselda.

Somehow, though, all this raw red meat soon gets a little tiresome without the sociological potatoes that Author Caldwell provided in his story of depression in the Deep South. And matters are not much improved by the frequent forays into rustic humor of a quality that is customarily found in hillbilly cartoons.

Cry Terror (MGM) might serve as a handbook on how to produce a high-powered, low-cost assembly-line movie--the kind that skips the expensive frills, plays up the cheap thrills. Step 1: save half a dozen major salaries by having a husband-and-wife team--in this instance, Andrew and Virginia (Julie) Stone--write, direct, produce, edit, audit, do everything but sweep up the set. Step 2: save cash on the cast by buying only one famous star--James Mason in this case--and support him strongly in the secondary roles, well played in this picture by Rod Steiger and Inger Stevens. Step 3: save several hundred grand in Hollywood sets and salaries by shooting the picture on location--much of this one was shot in Manhattan. Step 4: save time and intellectual labor by building the story out of standard parts from a dozen other plots. Stone combined the bomb-on-the-plane gimmick with the old blackmail routine, a straight kidnaping device, a timeworn hostage twist, a conventional rape sequence, a simple striptease, a fairly ordinary killing, three or four reliable FBI episodes, the well-known elevator-shaft sequence, and the chase along the subway tracks. Step 5: keep the moviegoer moving so fast from one thrill to another that he never has time to realize that the story makes very little sense. Final cost: less than $500,000, f.o.b. Hollywood. Probable gross: better than $2,000,000.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.