The New Pictures

I Want to Live! (Figaro; United Artists). "When you hear the pellets drop," says the kindly guard to the beautiful doll as he buckles her into the cyanide chamber, "take a deep breath and count ten. It's easier that way." The beautiful doll only flings him a sardonic question: "How do you know?" Barbara Graham (Susan Hay ward), according to this skillful screen version of the life and death of one of California's most celebrated criminals (TIME. June 13, 1955), is a woman who likes to find things out for herself. At 25, she has found out what it is like to be a vagrant, a prostitute, a gambler's shill, a convicted perjurer who has already served a total of three years in prison. At 30, according to California's public prosecutor, she finds out about murder--by pistol-whipping an old woman to death in the course of an unsuccessful robbery.

BLOODY BABS, THE TIGER WOMAN, scream the tabloids, and the jury gives her the limit. But Convict Graham protests her innocence, and her protest is supported by a well-known psychiatrist. Says he: "She is totally immoral, [but] her crimes are the crimes of those for whom physical violence is impossible." The defense appeals. The court upholds the death verdict. The date of execution is fixed.

What follows is perhaps the most effective provocation to panic that has been seen on-screen since the high-explosive horrors of The Wages of Fear (TIME. Feb. 21, 1955). The executioners--friendly, ordinary, matter-of-fact men who look as though they had never dispatched anything more vital than a letter--proceed calmly with their preparations, and the camera dispassionately watches every lethal detail. Gravely they draw on their rubber gloves. Delicately they decant the sulfuric acid. Tidily they bundle the little white eggs of cyanide into a sack of gauze. Politely they unroll the carpet from the cell door to the gas chamber. And so it goes, on and on and on, for almost 40 minutes--right to the bitter end.

The spectacle of a public execution has always drawn a crowd, and this one will probably be no exception, even though the witnesses must pay for the privilege. But in the post-mortem many witnesses will wonder what is the meaning of the painful lesson they have just been read. Is it a sermon on the wages of sin? Not really. The heroine, according to the script, is not punished for something she did, but for something she did not do. Is it an attack on the practice of capital punishment? Possibly. But the script spends no sympathy on the two men convicted as the heroine's accomplices, who meet the same fate as she does. Well then, what is it? To judge from the far-out photography, real desperate sound track, and dragsville dialogue that Krylon-spray the whole film with a cheap glaze of don't-care-if-I-do-die juvenility, Producer Walter Wanger seems less concerned to assist the triumph of justice than to provide the morbid market with a sure-enough gasser.

The Horse's Mouth (Lopert; United Artists). The stream of consciousness, as it comes boiling out of Gulley Jimson, the painter hero of the late Joyce Cary's masterpiece of monologue, is a wizard's brew--wine of genius mixed with just plain sewerage--that may be too rich for the average moviegoer's blood. Cary in his book (TIME, Feb. 6. 1950) displayed the Irish talent for tirade in formidable measure, and he revealed a teeming and generous vision of life, a Rabelaisian sense of comedy. To make a straight commercial movie out of such a vital, abundant creation was at best a poor idea, but it has to be said for Britain's Alec Guinness, who wrote the script and plays the principal part, that he has marshaled all of his considerable intelligence, taste and humor to make the best of the job.

Inevitably, the Jimsonian stream has been carefully filtered of what the censors would call impurities, and in the process much of the essential, grandly unsanitary, superbly healthy quality of Cary is eliminated too. Also absent from the film is Cary's seething energy, but Guinness supplies in its stead a stiff charge of farcical effervescence; and thanks to him. the mixture is never merely sweet. Every now and again the screen even exudes an earthy, salty, gingery, sweaty, whisky whiff of the essential Cary.

Guinness's script is reasonably faithful to Cary's story--what story there is. Gulley Jimson, a gutter genius who lives in a rotting houseboat on the Thames and has painted some of the most outrageously great pictures of his generation, is released from Wormwood Scrubbs prison, where he has just spent a month on charges of "uttering menaces"--he had threatened to cut out his patron's liver, or something of the sort. He trots over to the nearest pub, puts the bite on the barmaid (Kay Walsh), a middle-aged drab with a face, as Cary expressed it, "as blank as a sanitary brick." But she observes that Guinness is nothing but a "dirty old man," and besides he already owes her four quid nine and six.

The painter's patron offers to keep Gulley on a pension if only he will leave off the telephone calls. But the butler catches Gulley stealing a jade figurine from the patron's collection, so he is lucky to get out the kitchen door while the police are chasing round the parlor.

But along comes a man with money to burn and a wall to fill, and Guinness is off on one of the funniest half-hours he has ever played. When the millionaire takes a trip to Jamaica, Gulley without so much as a by-your-leave moves into his apartment and starts to paint a wall he has taken a shine to. Item by item he pawns the rich man's bibelots to buy the best of paints, the finest of champagne. Six weeks later, when the unwitting host and hostess walk in the front door, they stare in stupor at the devastation of their home--not to mention the wall, which looks as though it had been struck by an avalanche of garbage--and then sink quietly through a 6-ft. hole that somebody has carelessly knocked in the floor.

Guinness, of course, is a howl; the wheezing, hawking, spitting image of a merry old soak. He sports a fortnight's grizzle, along with "eyes like a pair of half-sucked acid drops," and he has developed a horrendously comic walk. Yet he never lets the spectator forget that Jimson is a man of parts--though he never quite manages to convince anybody that the old rapscallion is really a genius. The stupefyingly loud and uninteresting pictures he paints (actually the work of Britain's 30-year-old John Bratby) are partly responsible for the failure, but Guinness must share in the blame. He is a highly intelligent actor, but he simply lacks the demonic force to fill out a personality as large as Jimson's. And he seems to have ignored almost completely the extraordinary religious depths of the man, as expressed, for instance, in the amen he sings to life in his dying words.

"There you go," I said, "getting up a grievance. Which is about the worst mistake anyone can make, especially if he has one. Get rid of that sense of justice, or you'll feel sorry for yourself, and then you'll soon be dead ... Go love without the help of anything on earth; and that's real horse meat." "Please don't talk," said the nun, "you're very seriously ill." "Not so seriously as you're well. How don't you enjoy life, mother. I should laugh all round my neck at this minute if my shirt wasn't a bit on the tight side." "It would be better for you to pray." "Same thing, mother."

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