The New Pictures

The Miracle (Warner), a vast $3,000,000 pseudoreligious epic, is a travesty of the solemn pageant produced in 1911 by the late Max Reinhardt. Reinhardt's drama advanced through a series of large visions of the human condition, as successively they assailed a nun who had been lured from her convent by the Prince of this World, personified in a fluting cripple. Hollywood's version translates these noble obscurities into terms that the average moviegoer will more restfully recognize--right up to the moment when he falls asleep.

The nun is transformed into a postulant--a snappy little Spanish teen-ager with an Irish face (Carroll Baker) and something of a Bronx accent. The Tempter appears as the usual dashing dragoon (Roger Moore). The Reinhardt visions are reduced to a banal catalogue of wide-screen wonders, filmed in what is apparently intended to be glorious Goyacolor.

The lovers kiss, and the hurricane of their emotions, assisted by a battery of wind machines, bends saplings double. She flees the convent, and to judge by all the meteorological hell that breaks loose, the earth is fleeing the solar system too. Anyway, pretty soon a couple of gypsies (Katina Paxinou and Walter Slezak) drag the heroine off to live in their filthy caravan, where she hears that her dragoon is dead. She renounces religion and gives herself to a gypsy prince (Vittorio Gassman).

Soon the backslid heroine becomes a famous gypsy entertainer, travels through Europe from success to success and from sin (Gustavo Rojo) to sin (Dennis King). Crowd scene follows crowd scene: theaters, bullfights, battles. She finds her dragoon again at the side of the "Iron Duke" just before the Battle of Waterloo, which is thrown in for good measure. In the end, of course, she goes back to the convent, and at this point it becomes painfully apparent that the moviemakers intend, even at the risk of sacrilege, to have their unleavened bread and eat it too. But after more than two hours of claptrap, audiences will probably be too tired to care, except about just one thing: Will Miracle never cease?

Third Man on the Mountain (Buena Vista) may well become a children's classic of the screen, a sort of Tom Sawyer in the Alps. Based on James Ramsey Ullman's Banner in the Sky, the film describes the Alpine adventures of a teen-aged Swiss village boy (James MacArthur) who vows he will be the first climber to reach the top of the Matterhorn (known in the script as The Citadel) or die in the attempt as his father died before him. He joins the expedition of an English mountaineer (Michael Rennie) as a porter, and at the climax of the attempt discovers the long-sought passage to the summit.

Victory is within his grasp. Will he permit it to be snatched from him by the villain (Herbert Lorn), a sneery guide from the neighboring valley who sneaks off in the predawn darkness to beat him to the top? The last reel of the picture finds him chasing the wretch up what purports to be (but obviously is not) the sheer east face of the Matterhorn, in an exhibition of freehanded folly that made one old Alpinist who saw the picture snicker and inquire: "Why not do it on roller skates? It's just as safe.''

Most of the climbing scenes will in fact seem preposterous to anyone who has ever done 50 honest feet of Felskletterei. But to the average tree shinnier, for whom this picture is intended, they will surely look authentic and awesome. For the rest, the scenery (Matterhorn, Riffelhorn, Monte Rosa) is as spectacular as any Switzerland can show, and Hero MacArthur, in real life the son of Actress Helen Hayes, is the most wholesome-looking juvenile since Rin Tin Tin.

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