The New Pictures

The Sound and the Fury (20th Century-Fox) is the most interesting operation Hollywood has ever performed on a William Faulkner book. Scriptwriters Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr., in their shrewd but ruthless resection of the story, have revised almost every episode out of all resemblance to the novel, and have tidied up almost every character so as not to offend the mass public. Nevertheless, the result of all this figuring and jiggering is a picture that is both merchantable and unexpectedly moving.

The story, as the film tells it, is a sort of magnolia-strewn Jane Eyre. The hero (Yul Brynner) is a gloomy and passionate young man. The heroine (Joanne Woodward) is his ward, a gay young sprig on a rotten family tree. The Compsons have been drunk for a couple of generations, and have long since sold their birthright for a mess of corn liquor. The only thing left is the peeling old plantation house, and there the last of the Compsons live on the charity of the hero, who has become a Compson by adoption and is determined to redeem the family name.

The principal object of his salvage operation is the heroine. But he is so worried about the bad in her that he fails to appreciate the good, and she hates him for it. Sick of his tyranny, desperate for affection, she goes off on pathetic tangents of rebelliousness--threatens to undress in public, pawns her schoolbooks to pay for a permanent wave, takes clandestine bus trips to Memphis. "I gotta get chances in this life," she rages, and before long she gets one with a roustabout (Stuart Whitman) in a traveling carnival. He is not a bad young fellow, but he is not good either, and before he is through he almost takes the girl for everything she has--including $3,000 her guardian has been hoarding. Just in time for a happy ending, the heroine realizes that her guardian has been cruel only to be kind, and that what she feels for him is not really hate.

It is a conventional destination, but the film makes some fascinating stops along the way. There are some barracking good family quarrels and a couple of memorably steamy scenes of decadence. The direction, by Martin (The Long, Hot Summer) Ritt, is sure and vigorous. The acting is excellent. Actor Brynner, once the mind stops boggling at his henna-rinsed toupee, tugs powerfully at the sympathies. Actress Woodward, despite her tendency to develop mannerisms instead of a style, gives a winning and intelligent impression of an ugly duckling at the moment when she becomes a swan.

But it is Britain's Margaret Leighton, known to U.S. audiences as the star of Broadway's Separate Tables (TIME, Nov. 5, 1956), who is able to take the onlooker by the scruff of his emotions and lift him out of his seat. She plays the heroine's prodigal mother, a poor, silly, flirty, middle-aged Southern charmer who has lost her looks and finds she has nothing left to live on but her relatives, her whisky and a vanity case full of messy little memories. She comes home to discover that the daughter she abandoned at birth is a half-grown woman who needs her desperately. She longs to help her; for the first time in her miserable, selfish life she longs to do something for someone else. She finds that she cannot; she is not woman enough, is not human enough. The moment when mother and daughter must at last confront each other--when the mother must confront her whole life and understand that it has been wholly wasted and is now really and truly finished--is a scene of tragic force.

The Sins of Rose Bernd (President Films) is a strongly moving, somewhat silly modernization of a well-known play by German Naturalist Gerhart Hauptmann. First produced at the turn of the century, Rose Bernd was an angry editorial against man's inhumanity to unmarried mothers, and it stirred the social conscience of Europe. Like most editorials, Hauptmann's diatribe has lost something of its burning urgency in the course of half a century. Many people are still cruel to girls who get in trouble, but in most civilized communities such cruelty no longer enjoys social approval. The film therefore often seems to be crying over mopped-up milk; and at some of the most touching moments, it sounds almost like a ponderously wacky parody of an old-fashioned matinee drama.

Rose Bernd (Maria Schell) is a pretty maid of all work--and how the villains pursue her. The first of them (Raf Vallone) is the worst of them, but he is the one she likes best--a muscle-bound young buck who takes what he can get. Wading after her into the tall grass, he pants: "Es geht wie geschmiert" Rough translation: "She'll go like grease." English subtitle: "She's a cinch."

The second villain (Leopold Biberti) is her employer, a charming older man. One dark night the employer comes skulking into her bedroom. She gives birth to her baby in a culvert on a freezing winter day. Goodbye, cruel world? Not at all. An alternative (Hannes Messemer) has presented itself, and Rose, having learned her lesson, goes forward to face the future and make a better life.

Somehow this Matterhorn of warmed-over cabbage is not without a certain grandeur, and Director Wolfgang Staudte (Murderers Among Us) has made the most of it. He has dissolved the greasy German sentimentalities of his story in a lovely bath of light and Agfacolor. He has reduced the rigid forms of the stage play to the flowing substance of cinema. And he has aroused his actors to some very fine performances. Actor Messemer skillfully suggests a man who is more than he seems, while Actor Biberti devastatingly portrays a man who is less than he thinks. As for Actress Schell, she shows remarkable control of the subtle, brutal stages by which an unknowing girl is transformed into a bitterly experienced woman, who at the end can say with utter and awful authority: "What a small world you live in. You don't know what happens outside it. But I do. I have learned."

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