The New Pictures

The Night Heaven Fell (Raoul J. Levy; Kingsley International). "Is it fun to make love?" the foxy little doxy inquires as she hip-flips up to the camera and (as the French say) "makes the lip." Since the girl is played by Brigitte Bardot, she obviously has no trouble getting all sorts of answers to her question.

The first answer is very French but not much fun. Brigitte's uncle, a not-too-old goat of a Spanish nobleman, tries to horn in on her afternoon nap, and only the fortunate interruption of a passing prelate rescues the heroine (and the audience) from a fade worse than death. The second answer is very Spanish but rather grotesque. Since no suitable male is available, B.B. decides to make playful advances to a fighting bull. As she sidles up to him mooing small endearments, the poor bull just stands there looking cowed. The third answer is very Hollywood but sort of tedious. When a nice young sailor (Stephen Boyd) kills that nasty uncle, Brigitte helps him to escape. Night falls, and they hide out in an abandoned mill, a gypsy camp, a cave. On they go, one jump ahead of the police, until the censor has had just about all he can bare.

The story is not in itself a bad one, but as written it has a one-damn-thing-after-another monotony. And the color sometimes looks as if it had been scribbled over a black-and-white negative with children's crayons. In short, the film is carelessly put together--but Brigitte is not.

In Love and War (20th Century-Fox). In the midst of a battle sequence in this movie a wisecracking marine picks up a jangling field telephone. "Good morning," he says cheerily. "This is World War II." He couldn't be more mistaken. This is World War II as it seems, 13 years after the bloody fact, to a corps of Hollywood professionals who have unquestionably seen more scenes of combat in movie houses than in any actual theater of war. The big push in this picture, even though it is carefully filled out with official military footage, smells unmistakably of the klieg lamp, and the episodes on the home front, for all the respect they show to the times, might as well have taken place, not in the Roosevelt era but during the Nebuchadnezzar administration.

As for the plot--derived from a 1957 novel, The Big War, by Anton Myrer--it is the usual panoramic, cram-it-all-in, move-over-Tolstoy sort of thing, with a plural hero (Robert Wagner, Jeffrey Hunter, Bradford Dillman) who has any number of women (Dana Wynter, Hope Lange, Sheree North, France Nuyen) in his composite life. Nothing happens that has not happened a hundred times before in other war pictures--except perhaps an unusually large number of sincere but badly misdirected performances by promising young cinemactors. All of them, as Producer Jerry Wald proudly points out, have been carefully nurtured in the Fox talent school as a part of what Wald calls the studio's "reforestation program." A few pictures like this could reduce the lot of them to cordwood.

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