The New Pictures

Anna Lucasta (Longridge; United Artists), in the course of its on-again, off-again success story, has suffered more color changes than a traffic light. As first written, back in 1936, Anna was a backstreets melodrama in which Playwright Philip Yordan rummaged among some white trash in a small town. The principal characters were poor Poles, and the heroine was described by one playgoer as "a sort of squarehead Camille." When the play, as written, failed to get a Broadway opening, Playwright Yordan remaindered the rights to the American Negro Theater. The white trash became black trash, and caught fire. Anna moved to Broadway, played to packed houses for more than two years (1944-46). But Playwright Yordan, convinced that it was his characters and not their color that had made the play a success, decided that in the film they should change pigmentation again. They did, and somehow the film (1949) seemed rather pallid.

Accordingly, the makers of the second cinemattempt have decided to try the old black magic once more. This time it doesn't really work, but the play itself is principally to blame. It was never much good--barroom O'Neill at best, liberally sprinkled with intellectual sawdust ("I don't want to think; I want to drink"). The wages of sin are paid in dreary installments, but the writer is careful to make the sentimental deductions that most producers consider necessary for social security. The heroine follows the primrose path all the way, and finds that it leads to the altar.

The actors give considerably better than they get. Eartha Kitt is Anna, and her extraordinary animal glitter makes her histrionic limitations irrelevant. Sammy Davis Jr. is Danny, the oversexed sailor, and there are at least three major scenes in which Sammy, with superhuman energy, takes over the screen like a blackface Bugs Bunny.

The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad

(Morningside; Columbia) is one of the best monster pictures ever made for children. In fact, it is so horrifyingly good that some parents may want to scout it before letting their children see it. A new process called Dynamation, in which foam-rubber puppets are filmed in relation to live figures, has produced some chillingly realistic visions of monstrosity.

No sooner has the customer rubbed his magic wallet than presto! the first monster, a 50-ft. orange Cyclops, materializes on the screen and comes charging straight at him--the colossal eye rolling around in its prodigious socket like a cannon ball in a bathtub, the fangs dripping like bloody stalactites. Luckily, the wicked magician (Torin Thatcher) puts a whammy on the brute, but then he also puts a whammy on the beautiful princess (played by Kathryn Grant, billed as "Mrs. Bing Crosby"). Unfortunately, the audience will not get much of a look at the young celebrity. When the magician gets through with her, she is only 3 1/2 in. tall, and after that she spends most of her time shut up in a tiny, jewel-studded box.

Anyway, the hero (Kerwin Mathews) rushes off to find a roc's egg--a piece of the shell is one of the necessary ingredients for the potion that will restore the incredible shrinking princess to what the studio describes as "the correct size for fulfilling romance." On the egg hunt, the audience eludes a posse of shrieking demons, slups up a river of wine, makes friends with a teeny-weeny genie (Richard Eyer) in an oriental beanie, gets spitted by a man-eating Cyclops and clawed by a mighty hot roc that looks like a two-headed, yellow-legged, terrible-tempered B-52, fights a duel with an enchanted skeleton, and finally overcomes a hideous, flamethrowing, but wistfully reluctant dragon that flops about the screen like a lovable little old purple people eater.

Mad Little Island (J. Arthur Rank) is tolerable small beer, a sort of chaser to the whisky humours of Tight Little Island. The story takes place on the same isle of Todday, which became Tight on a wartime gift from the sea of 50,000 cases of fine Scotch whisky. It now gets Mad because the "foreign" government in London wants to set up a missile base. The island rises in hilarious revolt, is soon invaded by Her Majesty's paratroops. But the canny Scots recall the British weakness for small, defenseless creatures; and so, by methods that can only be described as fowl, the enemy at last is gulled.

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