The New Pictures

A Hole in the Head (Sincap; United Artists) is just what famed Filmaster Frank Capra (It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town) needed this picture like--unless, after an eight-year absence from moviemaking, it was only money he was after. The story about a Jewish family has undergone nearly every possible treatment by Author Arnold Schulman (one-act play, TV script, a novel, two full-length plays, one of which made Broadway) except maybe a synopsis baked inside a Chinese fortune cookie.

But no matter how it is spliced, it still comes out as a summertime snack of bagels and yaks.

Tony Manetta (Frank Sinatra) is a nogoodnik of a widower, a sort of amiable gonif (the names have been changed, but the characterizations are still Jewish). He is about to lose his sweaty hold on a two-bit Miami Beach hotel, but Big Shot Frankie. looking to turn a fast buck, spends his time trying to promote grandiose business ideas, romancing a far-out bongo-banging broad who lives at the top of the stairs, and treating his eleven-year-old son like a grownup. Faced with eviction, Frankie calls on his apoplectic brother (Edward G. Robinson), a rich New York merchant ("I haven't had a vacation in 24 years and I'm proud of it!"). Brother and his wife (Thelma Ritter) try to fix him up with a nice widow (Eleanor Parker). The rest of the script is farced and furious until, at picture's end, Brother stops pinching pennies, Frankie stops pinching the girl upstairs, and the whole family, including the widow, fade out, frolicking in the sand.

As the young widower, Sinatra gives a kind of bubble-gum snap to his role, and delivers just about as much substance. Young Eddie (The Music Man) Hodges is fine as the child who plays gin rummy with his father at 4 o'clock in the morning. As the feverish businessman who cannot fathom the playboy's vagaries, Edward G. Robinson has an intonation and gesture to fit every line--and all the best lines are his. To a cab driver who cynically returns a ten-cent tip: "What'sa matter, you don't need a dime? 7 need a dime, and I've got more money than you!"

But none of Director Capra's sharp, knowing touches about people really save this one-act vignette from being lost for 120 minutes on the wide screen. To beef it all up, he has loaded it with unconscionable plugs for the Miami Beach shoreline, an expensive hotel, fashion models, flamingos and dog races. But not even Capra could plug all the holes.

The Big Circus (Allied Artists) is an attempt by Producer Irwin (The Sea Around Us) Allen to shoot the rapids of the old DeMille stream. Under 120,000 sq. yds. of studio canvas (v. about 80,000 sq. ft. for a Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey big top), he presents a parade of stars--from a plumper Peter Lorre as a white-face clown to Mrs. Bing Crosby on a flying trapeze--and backs them up with everything from lion tamers and wire walkers to the Ronnie Lewis Trio, the Flying Alexanders, and Hugo Zacchini. the Human Cannon Ball. But as Ringmaster Vincent Price calls off act after act, The Big Circus often looks like a gaudily colored CinemaScope production of the Ed Sullivan Show.

The plot is as hard to swallow as a 3-ft. sword dipped in cotton candy. Owner Victor Mature's circus has financial problems, and Vic appeals to a bank for help. The bank puts the show on the road, but wisely insists that its own Red Buttons go along to keep an eye on the ledger, and throws in Rhonda Fleming as a beautiful pressagent. All is boffo for a while, but the script contains enough misfortunes to qualify as a Book of Job in a three-ring binder: a loose lion turns up for a press party; a flash fire threatens to duplicate the Hartford disaster of 1944; floods stop the show in the Midwest. Less than half the trouble results from acts of God; the rest is sabotage, an obvious inside job pulled by an agent of a rival circus.

To thwart the bank's threats of foreclosure. Impresario Mature decides to take his big top to Manhattan, but--on the wrong side of an Alpine wall of mountains that springs up somewhere vaguely west of Buffalo--the saboteur wrecks the train. The conductor says the mountain range is too rugged to be crossed by truck. Says Classicist Mature: "Two thousand years ago, there was a guy named Hannibal. We have more elephants than he had." And the circus moves on by pachyderm.* As if all this were not enough, High-Wire Man Gilbert Roland, for publicity's sake, tries to cross the Canadian border on a cable strung above a patently processed shot of Niagara Falls. Final crisis: a box-office-crippling subway strike in Manhattan, where The Big Circus is at last funneled into its proper channel--television.

Ten Seconds to Hell (Seven Arts-Hammer: United Artists) pits a six-man bomb-disposal team against a battalion of unexploded blockbusters nestling in the rubble of postwar Berlin. To give the gamble with fate an extra fillip, each man in the German demolition crew agrees to put half his salary in a common kitty, the survivors (if any) to divide the pot in three months' time.

Russian roulette movies of this kind have a fairly predictable order of casualties. The rookie with the baby face gets blown up first. Second to go is the hard-luck guy (killed by a tumbling wall at the moment of rescue). The sole husband and father dies next.

The hero (Jack Palance) tries to stop this lock-step parade to death, but the villain (Jeff Chandler) will not hear of it. These two are locked in a pseudo-philosophical Kulturkampf of their own. Chandler is a worldly European cynic, a me-first materialist. Palance is a mystical idealist of the all-men-are-brothers school. A line of W. H. Auden's sums up Director and Co-Scripter Robert Aldrich's fuzzily fashioned moral: "We must love one another--or die." After a tense day with the bombs, the vital question is whether Palance or Chandler will relax with the blonde French bombshell (Martine Carol). To well-appointed Actress Carol, emoting is a form of visual calisthenics: eyes right-left-right means terror, up-down-up means budding passion. By film's end, virtuous Jack Palance has got both the pot of gold and the up-down-up sign.

Ten Seconds to Hell is rarely caught with its suspense down. There are the sepulchral groans and squeaks as the rusty nose-bolts on the bombs begin to turn. There are the sweat-beaded pauses when the demolition man draws the cables taut as delicately as if he were landing a poorly hooked fish. There is the drawn-out moment when a seemingly defused bomb reveals a second fuse and blows a man to bits. And through it all, Director Aldrich deploys his camera like a melancholy tourist over the desolate Berlin ruins. As drama, Ten Seconds is something of a dud; as melodrama, it ticks like an activated blockbuster.

-* For news of another re-enactment of Hannibal's trip, see FOREIGN NEWS.

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