The New Pictures

Solomon and Sheba (Edward Small; United Artists), shot in Spain by King (The Big Parade, War and Peace&) Vidor at a cost of $4,000,000, had to be completely remade after the leading man, Tyrone Power, died of a heart attack.

Yul Brynner and another $2,000,000 were hurled into the breach, along with 3,000 soldiers--including almost the entire Spanish corps of cavalry. But all King's horses and all King's men couldn't put the pieces together again.

In the Bible story (7 Kings 10:1-13) the personal relation between Solomon (Brynner) and Sheba (Gina Lollobrigida) is mercifully accomplished in a clause: "And king Solomon gave unto the queen of Sheba all her desire, what soever she asked . . ." In the film version this statement is generously translated into two hours of full-color, wide-screen lust, in which all of Solomon's love affairs are lumped into one. In the case of Solomon (700 wives, 300 concubines) this makes quite a lump, but Lollobrigida does her breasty best to fill the part.

She Lollos about "altogether in the altogether" and slinks around in the usual Oriental undies, looking as if she had dressed herself with an airbrush, flaring her nostrils and moaning: "Geeve heem to me. I want heem at my feet." Brynner tries hard to keep up, but he lacks Gina's natural bounce as a performer -- and besides, his most photogenic feature is concealed by a wig. But he does manage to draw the biggest laugh in the picture when he remarks, as the camera turns to see what he claims to see in Gina: "Behind those lovely eyes is the brain of a very clever woman." Suddenly, Last Summer (Horizon; Columbia), the end product of Producer Sam (The Bridge on the River Kwai) Spiegel's attempt to multiply a one-act play by Tennessee Williams into a full-length feature picture, may not be the greatest movie ever made, but one thing can definitely be said of it: it is the only movie that has ever offered the paying public, for a single admission, a practicing homosexual, a psychotic heroine, a procuress-mother, a cannibalistic orgy and a sadistic nun. Showman Spiegel, who to Hollywood's amazement won a seal of approval for S.L.S. from both the Production Code Administration and the Legion of Decency ("separately classified"), has shrewdly presented the whole morbid mess as "an adult horror picture" about a woman "who is suddenly too old to procure boys for her son." Says Spiegel: "Why, it's a theme the masses can identify themselves with."

That is as the masses may decide, but the film undoubtedly tells a story they will shudder at. As it gets under way, an aging Southern belle (Katharine Hepburn) of the usual wickedly Williamsical sort is addressing a young neurosurgeon (Montgomery Clift). "I was the only one in his life," she says with ferocious tenderness. She is speaking of her son Sebastian, a precious young poet who died "suddenly, last summer," under mysterious circumstances, while on a European holiday with his cousin (Elizabeth Taylor). Ever since her son's death, the mother sweetly explains, his cousin has been insane, and now the only thing that will help her, the mother is convinced, is a lobotomy, which she wants the doctor to perform. In fact, she wants him to perform it quickly, and she offers to give $1,000,000 to his hospital when he has done the deed.

Suspicious of the mother's motives, the doctor examines the patient in an asylum run by the Roman Catholic Church, where she is bullied by a villainous nun. He finds the young woman sane enough except on one subject: she cannot remember how her cousin died, and she gets hysterical every time the matter is mentioned. He probes deeper, and in the end the whole slimy story comes out. Sebastian was a homosexual who for years had used his beautiful mother as bait for handsome men. When mother got too old, the men grew scarce, so Sebastian latched on to the prettiest young girl he could find, and went right on playing the same game.

The game worked only too well in the weeks before he died. Every day in the little Spanish town where he and Elizabeth (in a plunging white swimsuit) were staying and playing, he was surrounded by a huge crowd of poor, hungry young boys who were willing to do anything for food. On the day of his death, he was tired, and irritably tried to wave the crowd away. But they would not go. They closed in on him. He ran away. They pursued him to the top of a hill. And there, on the stones of an old pagan temple, they slashed him to death like a blood sacrifice, cut off pieces of his body and ate them.

Obviously, the big problem in such a picture is to pat all the various bits of dirt into some sort of significant mud pie, and Director Joseph (The Quiet American) Mankiewicz has done the patting with considerable skill and taste. His vague twilighting of the screen transports the audience instantly into the elegantly furnished womb where most of the action takes place. His cast is generally effective too. Actress Taylor's inability to reproduce a recognizable emotion becomes almost an advantage in a role that contains no recognizable emotions. Dr. Clift, whose gestures have in recent years been more and more reduced to twitches, sometimes looks even queerer than his patient, but on the whole he comes off as "glacially brilliant." And Katharine Hepburn, even though she is all dolled up like a cross between Auntie Mame and the White Queen, does an intelligent job of portraying the devouring mother.

But the main trouble with the picture is not its subject or its style, but its length. In the 70-minute, one-act play that Williams wrote, the action slithered about the spectator with the speed of a big snake, crushing in its clammy coils. In the 114-minute movie it glides along so languidly that the audience has time to wonder about what is happening; and to wonder about this story is to realize that it is nothing more than a psychiatric nursery drama, a homosexual fantasy of guilty pleasure and pleasurable punishment. The dead hero is really no more than a sort of perverted Peter Pan, and the cannibalism itself nothing more than an aggravated case of nail-biting.

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