The New Pictures

The Hanging Tree (Baroda; Warner), another "psychological western," is based on the rather odd premise that the American West was won on the consulting couches of Vienna.

The hero (Gary Cooper) is a sort of frontier Freud who can discharge a complex almost as fast as he can trigger a six gun. He sets up as a sawbones in a gold-mining camp, and pretty soon a pretty Swiss girl (Maria Schell), survivor of a stagecoach stickup, is brought in for treatment. He has no trouble healing her body--she is suffering from exposure, concussion, sun blindness. So then he sets out to heal her mind--she is suffering from the shock of seeing her father murdered by the bandits. As might be expected, the hero's methods of psychotherapy are suggested more by a sense of what the public wants to see than by any notion of what the doctor should order. He simply marches the heroine up to the edge of a cliff, forces her to look down, and coldly announces that her eyes are healed--if she can't see, it is because she does not want to see "things as they are." Things being as they are in this slick and artificial western, the spectator can hardly blame and may even envy her.

Still, there are moments when the hard-digging moviemakers strike it fairly rich. There are a couple of good fights, and a lynching bee in which the many-legged mob moves with the terrifying instinctual coordination and single-mindlessness of a colossal millipede gone mad. Karl Maiden makes a memorably silly-sinister billy goat. Actress Schell, holding a hard rein on her sentimental excesses, gives a gracious, intelligent performance. And though Actor Cooper, when required to produce the piercingly analytic stare, can do no more than push out his chin and look as though he is about to whinny, he demonstrates in a hundred subtle little platitudes of the prairie that he sure does know his oats.

The Trap (Paramount) is something a prudent moviegoer will not want to get caught in. It tells the unlikely story of an underworld overlord (Lee J. Cobb) wanted by the federal police, who takes over a small town in southern California, uses it as a base from which to stage his escape to Mexico. Unfortunately, the mobster has forgotten to fix the scriptwriters, who permit him to be captured by the hero (Richard Widmark) and his kid brother (Earl Holliman), who are involved in a nasty sibling rivalry over the kid brother's wife (Tina Louise). Anyway, they all start out across a gangster-infested desert in the direction of the nearest police station. Groans Actor Cobb: "It's gonna be a long, hot night." He's so right.

Aparajito (Edward Harrison) is Part Two of a trilogy, made in India by an amateur moviemaker (now turned professional) named Satyajit Ray. that promises to be one of the cinema's outstanding masterpieces. The trilogy is based on one of modern India's most popular novels, Pather Panchali, by Bibhuti Bannerji. Part One, Pather Panchali (TIME, Oct. 20). told a story of village life in northern India; of how a family tree was felled by the wind of the world; and of how the survivors, in anguish and confusion, broke with the medieval past and set out upon the weary and sorrowful journey to modern times. Aparajito ("The Story of Apu") describes their dreadful, beautiful encounter with the future.

The story begins in Benares, where the family has taken quarters in a poor but respectable part of the city. The father, a priest and a scholar, puts in a long day as a religious teacher on the banks of the holy Ganges. The mother struggles to make a home in a strange new world, to observe the country decencies and obey the laws of caste. But how can she keep her son Apu, now ten, from running wild in the swarming streets?

The father dies. The mother goes to work as a cook for a wealthy family. Not a bad life for her, but what about the boy? He spends his spare time cadging pennies by picking lice out of the rich man's hair. But then the rich man takes mother and son to his country estate, and for a while they are both very happy. Apu plays in the fields and studies to be a priest like his father--a matter that involves more folklore than book learning. Yet one day Apu comes home with a faraway look in his eyes. "Mother," he announces, "I want to go to school."

Mother sends him, at no little sacrifice, and he proves a spectacular student. Several years later he wins a scholarship to the university in Calcutta. He rushes home in tremendous excitement. "Mother, can I go?" And here begins the long, slow, exquisite resolution of the drama: the story of how the mother dies in order that Apu may live as he was meant to live. The mother gives and gives, the son takes and takes. The only thanks she gets are sulks, or at best indifference. Her heart bleeds, but she is wise enough to understand that in hurting his mother he is only trying to end his dependence on her; that the pain he inflicts on her is a measure of the fear he feels that he may fail to become a man. At every point the relationship between mother and growing boy is exactly understood and poignantly expressed. Because of her great love and understanding, she does not tell her son that she is ill and that if she gives him money to go to college, she cannot afford to cure herself. She is strong enough to let him go; he is strong enough to leave. Death cuts the cord.

Aparajito will probably be weighed in the balance with Pather Panchali and found slightly wanting. But such a comparison misses the point: as the second movement in a composition, Aparajito is meant to express the consequences of the first movement, Father Panchali, and to prepare the mood of the third movement, Apu Jagat ("The World of Apu"), which will probably be released in the U.S. in late 1959. In a pictorial sense the film lacks something of the noble simplicity of Father Panchali, but if its images are more sophisticated, they are no less brilliant and effective. What is perhaps most striking to the Western observer is the profoundly Asiatic quality of the moviemaker's genius. He suffers passionately with his characters, and yet all the while remains curiously calm and almost indifferent, as though he understood that life must ultimately find its meaning and its peace in something larger than life.

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