The New Pictures

Street of Shame (Daiei; Harrison), the last picture completed by the late Kenji (Ugetsu) Mizoguchi, perhaps the most gifted of recent Japanese moviemakers, is a Dickensian diatribe against prostitution. At the time the movie was released, Japan had some 500,000 "flowery-willowy" girls, and the picture is said to have swayed millions to support the stop-prostitution bill that was passed in 1956. In the U.S., where prostitution has seldom been seriously discussed on the screen, audiences will no doubt be stunned by the film's unblinking realism. But they will probably not be startled by the scriptwriter's discovery that every whore has a heart of gold.

The film investigates the lives of six prostitutes who work in "Dreamland," a better-class brothel in Tokyo's notorious Yoshiwara district, and for the most part, the acting is excellent. Machiko Kyo is particularly good. She slips so naturally into lace undies and Americanized manners that she is hard to recognize as the stilted medieval heroine of Rashomon and Gate of Hell. If the story seems repetitive and interminable, so indeed must the life of a prostitute.

The Rabbit Trap (Canon; United Artists). Once upon a time there was a company man (Ernest Borgnine). He worked as a draftsman for a construction outfit, and the fellows all called him "Steady Eddie" because he was never late, never sick, never idle, never got a raise. One year the boss (David Brian) got bighearted and let him take a two-week vacation with pay. So Eddie piled the wife and kid in his '53 Chevy and headed for a place called Deep Springs, where there were some nice cabins, not too expensive. But after a couple of days, the boss rang up and told him he would have to come back right away. The missus was good and sore and the boy was heartbroken, but Eddie went. "I don't have a college education," was the way he figured it. "I got to be dependable."

Back home, the kid suddenly remembered the box trap he and his dad had set in the woods at Deep Springs. What if a rabbit got caught in it? Nobody would let him out and he would starve to death. The boy was so sick about the rabbit that Eddie realized he would lose his son's respect, not to mention his own self-respect, if he did not go back and let it out. But the boss was in such a flap about the job that Eddie was afraid to take the day off and make the trip. In the end Eddie had to make the hard old choice between position and principle, between making a living and making a life. And so at last the rabbit got out of the trap.

The Rabbit Trap was apparently intended as a sleeper, but seems likely to wind up as what the exhibitors call a caboose--the back end of a double bill. In a way, it's a pity. As a social prescription, the story proposes a too simple cure for conformism, but it provides, as a sort of fable for the times, a useful moral: not all rabbits have long ears.

Woman Obsessed (20th Century-Fox). "You'll never touch me again!" cries the red-haired Saskatchewan farm wife (Susan Hayward) at her rednecked husband (Stephen Boyd), who has just whopped her one in the face. She slams the bedroom door and locks it. Bellowing like a mad bull, he busts the door down and--blackout. Several scenes later, Susan announces bitterly that she is pregnant. As the four-column ads explain it: "She hated the child whose life stirred within her because it was part of him whom she loathed and despised." She prays that she will lose it, and one night in a storm she stumbles out into the barnyard and has a miscarriage in the mud. Husband Boyd, generously letting bygones be bygones picks her up in his brawny arms and staggers six miles cross-country to the doctor. Then he turns around and staggers back to the farm to take care of Susan's seven-year-old son (Dennis Holmes). But the boy, who thinks that Boyd has killed his mother, tries to take care of him first. He lures the man to a convenient quagmire, all set to snicker as he sinks, but Actor Boyd keeps his chin up. Meanwhile, back at the village, Susan is realizing how wrong she has been about her husband. All those horrible things he did to her were not really horrible at all, the script says, because the poor fellow had an unhappy childhood. Tortured with remorse, Susan turns her head away. "Would you mind leaving me alone?" she murmurs hoarsely. It's a question that deserves an answer.

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