The New Pictures

Back to the Wall (Essex-Universal; Ellis) is a French murder mystery. The victim (Philippe Nicaud) is a young Parisian actor who drinks Scotch and smokes English cigarettes, but his outstanding habit is routinely French. The poor fellow cannot stop making love to another man's wife (Jeanne Moreau), his sweetheart from drama-school days. As the film begins, the husband (Gerard Oury), a dull young electronics millionaire, is expanding his plant, reinforcing a new concrete wall with the corpse of his wife's lover.

The rest is one long cuckold-doodle-do. The husband explains by flashbacks how he secretly learned of the infidelity and how he reacted with something more than a Gallic shrug. His grandfather might have shot, whipped or choked the villain straightway. But a man of the husband's generation intends no violence. Instead, he wants to stretch the lovers on a psychological rack, then leave the actor there and reclaim his wife. As a starter, he hires a private detective to make keyhole photographs. For divorce proceedings? "Mais non. For the family album."

At first he succeeds. He blackmails his wife anonymously. She borrows from him to raise money for the payoff ("It is easy to be generous," he tells the audience, "when you are sending money to yourself"). Later, he smoothly implicates her lover as a blackmailing gigolo. But the methodical husband has touched off a larger explosion than he designed, and the film resolves itself in a series of novel twists, most of which are so awkwardly handled that they seem to come off only in Director Edouard Molinaro's heavy hand.

Molinaro, 31, is part of the so-called "new wave" of young French directors. If Back to the Wall bears any message, it is that the new wave is still some distance from shore and seems to be headed in the wrong direction. More American than French, the film lathers its small offering of Frankish realism and nuance with a thick layer of Hollywood formula.

That Kind of Woman (Ponti-Girosi; Paramount) brings together Sophia Loren and Tab Hunter, although that kind of woman should never be mated with that kind of man. They meet in the club car of a Miami-to-New York train. "He doesn't look old enough to drink," taunts Sophia. The tall towhead leans forward over the table, sternly wobbles his eyeballs, says: "I'm old enough to do anything." Sure enough, the script requires her to pick up the Tab.

The year is 1944. He is a paratrooper without fear, brains or money. She is the mistress of an industrial titan (George Sanders), who keeps her in his elegant Manhattan mansion, where they "get along rather well in those rather delicate areas where it seems important for a man and woman to get along." Tab follows her there, mumbles that he loves her. But Sanders also thinks highly of her, proposes marriage, offers her a name "that's regarded rather like being named Windsor in England." Will she take the baby-faced lad, or will she marry the devoted gentleman with vaults of gold? Sanders gracefully steps aside to allow her to come to her decision, but Tab leans forward again--in Central Park, Staten Island and Grand Central Station--and displays those bald eyeballs. Meekly Sophia once more obeys the scriptwriter. Tab takes possession, like a tot getting behind the wheel of a Thunderbird.

The Glass Tower (Bavaria-Filmkunst; Ellis) is a big, bareboned West Berlin penthouse, where Lilli Palmer perches like a trapped pigeon, caught in the dual grip of a possessive husband and a plot as paper-thin as strudel crust. Her husband (O. E. Hasse), a vain, autocratic man of means, sees Lilli as a beautiful confirmation of his success. Along comes a handsome German-American playwright (Peter Van Eyck), who reminds Lilli of her former glory as a great actress, persuades her to star in his new drama about a nun who gets raped. Her psychiatrist decides that "somewhere in your mind there's a conflict," but everything is resolved when 1) Lilli has a therapeutic narcosis behind the padded doors of a neuological clinic, 2) the playwright makes love to her in an all-glass phone booth, and 3) her husband adds a lethal shot of arsenic to his vermouth.

German-made Tower is technically first-rate, precisioned as a Mercedes, and German-born Actress Palmer is a suave, consummate performer. The camera ranges so fluently through her glass prison it seems a pity that the action it catches is mostly senseless Sturm und Drang.

A Private's Affair (20th Century-Fox), a sort of See Here, Private Mineo, is a comedy about modern G.I.s--sons of the soldiers of World War II. The theme song announces that It's the Same Old Army, and the jokes, at least, are scarred veterans (Sergeant: "Suppose he doesn't recover consciousness, sir?" General: "He has to. It's an order."). Also familiar is the debatable thesis that there are no snobs in foxholes, or even in barracks on the first day of basic training. Immediate buddyhood is established among Sal Mineo, a jivey cat from Manhattan's Lower East Side; Barry Coe, an Ivy sort from Glen Cove, L.I.; and Gary Crosby, who is cast as a rich Oregon rancher's son but manages to mug, wheeze and groan like a Bing from another planet.

It is not really the same old Army. Among the calisthenics of basic training are a service-club dance, a seaside romp, and a production number on a Manhattan TV variety show starring the recruits. At the dance, Socialite Coe falls for a French girl (Christine Carere) who works as a translator in an ad agency and lives downstairs from Mineo. Crosby pairs with a WAC flack (Barbara Eden). Mineo meets the socialite's pedigreed next-door neighbor (Terry Moore). He leads her to the dance floor, wiggles his ribs, rocks a little, rolls a little, and the Junior League is ready for stickball.

The absurdly complicated plot is unnecessary, since the film is aimed at teenagers and Actor Mineo is the main attraction. Because he is a beatnik? "No, man, I don't make that scene." He merely sounds like one. He is actually the kid in the next tenement, with the curly hair, the baby Latin face and the duck-tailed dialogue: "Oh, man, are you sick! I mean like real sick!" Now pushing 21, Mineo is the coolest if not the oldest living teenager.

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