The New Pictures

For the First Time (Corona; MGM) presents outsize Tenor Mario ("My voice is the greatest in the world") Lanza as an "unpredictable, erratic, self-centered" American singer who is chased by an overdressed, "publicity-loving" international party girl (Zsa Zsa Gabor). The casting is pluperfect, but most of the picture is a pretentious bore. The pre recorded songs seem unable to locate Lanza's lips, and some of the arias might even have been scraped off old Lanza sound tracks. The only new number, a "Jamaican rock 'n' roll" item called Pineapple Pickers, summons little of the old Mario magic and all of the old mannerisms: aggressive smile, athletic nostrils, orbiting eyeballs and quivering poundage.

The tenuous plot has the out-of-sorts singer brought to his senses by a pretty Viennese Fraeulein, nicely played by German Actress Johanna von Koczian, in her American screen debut. She is the only woman on the Continent whom Mario can trust to love him for love alone. Reason: she is stone deaf. That is, until she has that operation, "dangerously close to the brain." If, like Johanna, moviegoers could keep their ears closed and their eyes open, they might enjoy Salzburg, Rome, Capri and Anacapri in fetching color. And by letting Zsa Zsa be Zsa Zsa, Director Rudi (Dodsworth) Mate has managed to extract a jigger of humor from a magnum of slush. When Mario protests the presence of reporters at what was to be an intimate little party, Zsa Zsa says: "But dahr-link, deese are my most intimate friends -- United Press, Associated Press, and Meester Reuter!" The Devil's Disciple (Hecht-Hill-Lancaster & Brynaprod; United Artists). Its carpingest critic said of this 1897 comedy: "It will assuredly lose its gloss with the lapse of time, and leave itself exposed as the threadbare popular melodrama it technically is." The critic also happened to be the play's author, George Bernard Shaw. Rashly ignoring the warning of a wise old showman, Hollywood has at tempted to put new life into the languid old yarn about shenanigans in Revolutionary War days. The British side (Sir Laurence Olivier) comes off better than the Colonials (Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster).

As Dick Dudgeon, the imposturing knave of the title, Actor Douglas gnashes his teeth -- as well as the arch dialogue --and looks less like the male Candida that Shaw intended than like a Sportin' Life in tights. Actor Lancaster, as the local parson, glooms away Shaw's most romantic scenes as if he were lost on a Bronte moor. In a climactic scene of comic derring-do, ex-Acrobat Lancaster makes heroic hash of a colonial court house and all the Redcoats in it. Otherwise he is as stiff and starchy as the clerical collar he eventually gives up.

G.B.S. made British General John Burgoyne an Act Ill-only character, but the moviemakers have wisely fattened up the part to the measure of Sir Laurence Olivier. As fox-sly "Gentleman Johnny," Olivier struts, smirks, sneers and, from under a preposterously foppish plume, spouts the withering witticisms that kept the original play stylish even while it was out of balance. Sample: "Martyrdom, sir, is the only way in which a man can be come famous without ability." And when Douglas pleads for death by firing squad rather than by hanging, Burgoyne asks: "Have you any idea of the average marks manship of the Army of His Majesty King George III?" But Devil remains threadbare and lacks, as Shaw also noted, "a single even passably novel incident."

The Possessors (Filmsonor Intermondia: Lopert) are all members of one big unhappy family who made their first appearance in Maurice Druon's Les Grandes Families, a 1948 Prix Goncourt novel based on some of the Two Hundred Families that presumably ruled France between the two World Wars.

In this glossy French import, the gloomy patriarch of the dynasty (banks, refineries, mines, newspapers) is white-thatched Jean Gabin, a cold-eyed, cunning old autocrat. When men or industries get out of line, Papa Jean straightens everything out with a deft and ruthless hand. He arranges a wedding between an innocent man and his own ward when she gets pregnant by a Gabin employee. He bribes a high government official on behalf of a military relative. With high handed dispatch, he breaks up an affair between his luxury-loving cousin and a fifth-rate actress. Only when he gambles with his own son's life and loses, does so much as a shadow of remorse flicker across his cynical, craggy old face. And does the villain finally get his comeuppance? Not really. Presumably he goes on making bigger deals by day even if, in the wake of his son's suicide, he does not sleep well by night.

Though the director has caught some visual excitement in Paris, his camera is mostly cold and apathetic. But the pic ture is blessed with urbane Gallic polish, some satiric set pieces, and another en gaging performance by Actor Gabin, who at 55 is still the No. 1 male box-office draw of French films.

It Started with a Kiss (M-G-M). "Any marriage is wrong when you take the sex out of it," complains newlywed Air Force Sergeant Glenn Ford, who has just arrived from two sexless years in Iceland. "Do you think you're smarter than Freud?" he asks Showgirl Debbie Reynolds, who thinks she is -- almost. In the first days of their marriage she gets the notion in her orange-rinsed head that sex clouds her judgment. "The trouble with us is the only thing we have in common is this physical attraction," she explains. In order to assure herself that her bridegroom is not slouching around her boudoir "for the wrong reason," Debbie decrees that there will be no beddingdown together for one month. The spurned husband takes three cold showers a day, and the newlyweds fill the frustrated hours with a colorful junket about Spain, where much of the picture was shot. As a studio pressagent describes it: "It's a drawing-room comedy, mostly out doors." Or, as the teen-agers say, mostly out to lunch.

The Man Upstairs (A.C.T.; Kingsley Union) is a demented scientist (Richard Attenborough) who got that way after a miscalculation in the lab resulted in the death of a fellow researcher. He is holed up on the top floor of a sleazy London rooming house, armed with a gun, taunted by twisted dreams, "cold as a frog, and icy as charity." The problem -- how to get him down without harm to anyone, including himself -- has been tackled in films before, notably in Fourteen Hours, but under the brisk directorial hand of Don Chaffey, this modest little British import seems as fresh as it is familiar.

Though the other lodgers have too much to say and too little to do, each of them is carved with cameo clarity: the "black-coated, sandwiches-for-lunch, nine-to-five-thirty" clerk who calls the cops; an Angry Young Artist; an addlepated old crone; the brandy-soaked landlady.

It is around the sympathetic roomers' conflict with strong-armed officialdom that the tension swirls and the picture makes its points: 1) every man is his brother's keeper; and 2) the law can be depended on for bureaucratic bungling.

The camera pokes up and down stair wells and into everybody's private quar ters like an inquisitive onlooker, and as in High Noon, the action it catches spans the same time length as the movie itself, a chilling 88 minutes.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.