The New Pictures

The Black Orchid (Ponti-Girosi; Paramount) is a sort of Marty-come-lately, inspired by one of the less startling of sociological discoveries: poor people are human. From this premise the moviemakers have deduced the facts of low-budget life as presented in this film: 1) poverty is cute, 2) stupidity is lovable, 3) sentimentality is feeling, 4) hard work never killed anybody, 5) suffering is actually good for people, and 6) anyway, there is always sex.

In the course of their study, the Hollywood sociologists have also investigated a specific minority group, the Italian Americans, and have reached some unshakable conclusions: 1) many of them speak broken English, 2) most of them eat spaghetti, 3) some of them grow up to be gangsters. As a matter of fact, that is what the heroine (Sophia Loren), the widow of a racketeer, is afraid her son will do. The boy is only twelve years old, and already he has been caught tampering with a parking meter and sent off to a work farm. The hero (Anthony Quinn), a well-preserved, middle-aged widower with a small business of his own, makes the widow a heartfelt proposal: Let's get married and give the boy a decent home to grow up in.

It seems a sensible idea, and it might have been the theme of a sensible attempt at row-house realism, but Scriptwriter Joseph Stefano has loaded this piece of pizza with a mess of indigestible sentimentality, and Director Martin Ritt has turned it out half-baked. In the last half of the story, even Actor Quinn, usually a rock-solid performer, comes apart like a discouraged anchovy.

Sleeping Beauty (Buena Vista), if she could see what has happened to her in this full-length feature cartoon by Walt Disney, would wake up screaming. As on a couple of previous occasions (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella), Moviemaker Disney has tangled with an innocent and lovely old folk tale, and this time he can be charged with a particularly unpleasant case of assault and battery. The story itself, as preserved by Charles Perrault, is a legend that elucidates one of life's darkest mysteries: how the human soul lies sunk in a deathlike trance until it is awakened by the heroic spirit. Yet as presented in this "herculean," $6,000,000 version, the myth is just crude continuity for a colossal comic strip, and the more boings and EEEEEEEKs the moviemaker can get into his story, the better he seems to like it.

Even the drawing in Sleeping Beauty is crude: a compromise between sentimental, crayon-book childishness and the sort of cute, commercial cubism that tries to seem daring but is really just square. The hero and heroine are sugar sculpture, and the witch looks like a clumsy tracing from a Charles Addams cartoon. The plot often seems to owe less to the tradition of the fairy tale than to the formula of the monster movie. In the final reel it is not a mere old-fashioned witch the hero has to kill, but the very latest model of The Thing From 40,000 Fathoms.

These Thousand Hills (20th Century-Fox). The novels of A. B. Guthrie Jr. (The Big Sky) flash across the mind like fine movies. As movies, unfortunately, they sometimes mumble along like bad novels. The author writes atmosphere as naturally as nature makes weather, but his situations often owe less to the good old West than to the bad old westerns. In These Thousand Hills, Hollywood has unhappily chosen to overlook the atmosphere and underline the cliches. And so what might have been a fine piece of buckskin naturalism turns out to be just another million-dollar game of cowboys and Indians.

Guthrie's book described how the men who had won the West sat down to manage their vast estate, how the buckaroos became Babbitts. The movie reduces this process of history to a commonplace: Will success spoil Lat Evans? Lat (Don Murray) is the hero, a young wet-ear from Oregon who comes stringing into the Montana territory to make his stake. "Ah ain't afraida hard work," he tells his sidekick, jaw set. "Ah jus' doan wanna die pore." So that summer he rides trail like to burn off his backside, and the next winter he goes bounty snatching, wolves and such. But, come grass, he's still as stone-sucking pore as ever he was.

Miss Callie, though, a little cat-house kitten (Lee Remick), puts up the mortgage money, and Lat buys himself a spread. What with haystacks and hand-feeding, he weathers his stock through the big winter of 1886-87 and fattens them into a small fortune next spring. So Lat gets to be a big man in Montana, and he marries the banker's niece (Patricia Owens); but somehow the closer he gets to where he is going, the less he remembers about where he came from, and especially about where the mortgage money came from, and what sort of girl he left behind. And then one day the villain (Richard Egan) dares to raise his hand to Miss Callie.

Still, it's a pretty good fight while it lasts, and serves to dramatize the egalitarian moral of the movie: you can't keep a good man up.

The Devil Strikes At Night (Zenith International). The leaders of the Nazi Party seem to have been startled, during the spring of 1944, to discover that the state monopoly on wholesale murder had been threatened by a rugged individualist named Bruno Luedke, a village idiot who in eleven years strangled at least 50 women, possibly as many as 100. What disturbed the government was the political implication. The allied enemies would be sure to derive considerable aid and comfort from the fact that the second most successful mass murderer of modern times was also a German. What to do with the case? The records suggest that Adolf Hitler himself supplied the answer: file and forget it. The records of the investigation were impounded. The investigators were sworn to secrecy. The murderer was quietly murdered. The Third Reich's department of justice was officially informed that Bruno Luedke had never existed.

This sinister story is told with a good deal of cinematic skill and care by Director Robert (The Killers') Siodmak in one of the best German-made thrillers of recent years. Hannes Messemer is unpleasantly effective as a big fish in the upper depths of the Gestapo, and Mario Adorf, as he shambles in evil stupor through the horrible rote of lust and destruction, is sickeningly plausible as the killer from Koepenick.

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