The New Pictures

The Big Fisherman (Centurion Films; Buena Vista) will probably net the biggest box-office catch since The Ten Commandments, despite the fact that it has all the vices and almost none of the homely virtues of the Lloyd C. Douglas novel that inspired it. For oldtime Moviemaker Rowland V. Lee (The Count of Monte Cristo) knows just where the millions lie: in fictionalized history, resplendently costumed, sexed up, and heavily flavored with religion. There are sumptuous orgies in palaces that look like the new banks of Beverly Hills; John the Baptist is beheaded in 70-mm. Panavision, color and stereophonic sound; and "the temptress" (Martha Hyer) moves about murmuring to Herod Antipas, "You thrill my inmost being." There is also the Sermon on the Mount, delivered by an offstage voice in soft-sell tones. There are stabbings, hurricanes, ambushes, chases, the miracles of Christ, racial conflict between Arabs and Jews, one case of polio and a death by charcoal burner.

The bewildering plot runs in and out and on and on. An Arab prince, played with unabashed narcissism by John Saxon, pursues an ebony-eyed half-breed (Susan Kohner) through the three tasteless hours and 14 minutes (with intermission), only to lose her in the end. "Some day I'll find you," he trills after her. And towering woodenly over all the power struggles and polyglot types is big Bass-Baritone Howard Keel, who plays "two-fisted and profane" Simon Peter as if he had never left Carousel.

Novelist Douglas himself dismissed his ludicrous situations and pasteboard characters as "tiresomely decent," and moviegoers might have been spared this whole hodgepodge had the author lived. The year he finished Fisherman, he said: "I'm just an irascible old man who has written a book and wants it to stay a book! I don't want the movies fumbling with it. It's too much for the movies."

The Scapegoat(DuMaurier-Guinness; M-G-M), based on Daphne du Maurier's bestselling 1957 novel, is a half-serious attempt to articulate on film some notions that fascinated the author: "I wanted to discover, for myself, what happened to a man who was no longer himself. Would he, assuming the identity of another, take on the sins and the burdens and the emotions of the [other] or would his own hidden secret self become released in the other's image and so take charge?"

The Scapegoat is a frayed, middle-aging English professor (Alec Guinness) who goes on a holiday in France with nothing to declare but a hollow in the heart. He no sooner suggests that "a man has to be empty before he can be used" than he has a chance encounter with a decadent French count (Alec Guinness) whom he strikingly resembles. The professor is tricked into assuming the Frenchman's identity, along with a down-at-the-plumbing Loire chateau crammed with impressive horrors: the count's plaintive wife (Irene Worth), who fears for her life because of a portentous clause in her marriage contract; his child-mystic daughter (Annabel Bartlett), who paints pictures of "secret police" shooting arrows into St. Sebastian; a serpent-eyed sister (Pamela Brown) who blames her brother for the death of her fiance; and a dotty old dowager (Bette Davis) who writhes and flops about a cream-puffy bed, smokes cigars and has her morphine served up in toy Easter eggs from Paris. For the lonely professor, there is a lone delight in a strange legacy: the scapegrace's mistress, the only person who knows about the lookalikes, presumably because they make love differently.

Just as the professor is about to put a new broom to all the cobwebbed corners and mend some of the broken lives around him, the count returns. He flings his wife out the window, hoping to frame his double, but the cagey Briton, now enjoying his imposture, proves himself innocent and refuses to be relieved of stewardship. The two Guinnesses shoot it out in a cryptic climax that leaves both audience and the chateau puppets dangling in confusion.

On one score the movie succeeds where the book failed: the suspense turns not on Whether the scapegoat will reveal himself but on how he will handle himself in each situation. And moviegoers have the best of Author du Maurier's bestseller props: intrigue, murder, romance, another haunted Manderley setting, and a generous helping of hokum. As the author herself commented on her work: "This time I have gone the whole hog."

North by Northwest (M-G-M). While in Manhattan shooting the early scenes of this film, Director Alfred Hitchcock grumbled that newspapers tell too many "outlandish stories from real life that drive the spinner of suspense fiction to further extremes." "Further extremes" turns out to be a point on Hitchcock's compass. Direction: North by Northwest.

Smoothly troweled and thoroughly entertaining, North by Northwest wears its implausibilities lightly, bobs swiftly past colored picture postcard backgrounds from Madison Avenue to South Dakota's Mount Rushmore, the U.N. Secretariat to George Washington's wattles. As the story begins. Adman Gary Grant has little on his mind but Trendex and his waistline (he reminds himself to "think thin") until enemy agents mistake him for a U.S. counterspy and kidnap him from a cocktail lounge in the Hotel Plaza. Spy Ringleader James Mason (as polished and heavy as a Kremlin banister) invites Grant to spill all he knows. But all the adman knows has long since been run up flagpoles.

The bad guys force a fifth of bourbon down Cary and turn him loose in a sports car to destroy himself--but he merely gets arrested and comes back after them to clear his name. They frame him with a knife murder committed in a reception lounge of the U.N. and, when he flees the city, arrange for a purring hood-nymph (Eva Marie Saint) to pick him up on the 20th Century Limited. But Cary has made his way to her berth before the train makes Albany. The villains lure him out onto an Indiana cornfield, where a crop duster in a biplane strafes him. He comes through it all looking like an ad for Brooks Brothers. And by now the villains are beginning to catch on to what U.S. moviegoers could have told them all along: it will take a lot more than an army of Communist spies to do away with Cary Grant.

But even Cary eventually shows a touch of strain as the film's glibly rococo plot closes in on Mount Rushmore ("I don't like the way Teddy Roosevelt is looking at me") and he is up to his immaculate collar in spies and counter spies, including a tweedy troubleshooter from Washington (Leo G. Carroll), the only man alive who seems to understand what is going on. The final scenes leading to the inevitable chase fairly tingle with Hitchcock-signature direction (such as a closeup of an oncoming fist). The suspense is beautiful as the bad guys nearly wipe out all the good guys and almost get away with the microfilm. Then Hitchcock reaches North by Northwest's ultimate "further extreme": a fugitive Eva Marie Saint scrambling down Thomas Jefferson's forehead in high heels.

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