The New Pictures

Five Branded Women (Dino De Laurentiis; Paramount). "I did not loave a German," the proud beauty (Silvana Mangano) sneers at a stern chief (Van Heflin) of the Yugoslav partisans. "I loaved a man!" But the partisans aren't having any of that. They have already mutilated the German sergeant (Steve Forrest) Silvana was committing treason with, and they are obviously determined to cut her up too. A grimy partisan approaches her with scissors drawn. Van twists her arms behind her back. Her bosom heaves. A horrible thought flashes across the spectator's mind. Then they cut off her hair.

As a matter "of fact, they cut the hair off four other girls (Barbara Bel Geddes, Jeanne Moreau, Vera Miles, Carla Gravina) in the same town, because the sergeant evidently got around. And for the rest of this 100-minute movie, which was made in Italy and Austria by Director Martin (The Sound and the Fury) Ritt, the customers watch a quintet of crew-cut cuties who look about as exciting as a boy scout troop on an overnight hike.

Luckily, there is plenty of action to occupy the eye; the girls have a close shave every few minutes. Kicked out of town by the Germans, who don't like to be reminded by their presence of the partisans' power, the fallen women take to the woods, filch food from farmhouses, steal boots and guns from dead Germans, shoot two Home Guards who try to rape them, ambush a Wehrmacht reprisal party, and finally join the same band of partisans that had punished them. Happy ending? Not with 70 minutes still to go. "I must warn you,'' Heflin thunders at the fresh recruits, "that our law forbids sexual relations." Reason: "Bad for morale." Penalty: death. The idea is to sublimate sexual desire into ballistic aggression against the enemy. But the idea does not really work. After banging away for several months. Heroine Mangano turns to Hero Heflin, and, as the audience mutters amen, softly moans: "Will there never be--peace?"

Pollyanna (Walt Disney; Buena Vista), a novel for nice young ladies, published in 1913, by a refined New England novelist named Eleanor H. Porter, was an irresistible tearjerker that drenched the pillows of grandma's generation and added to the language a new word for the sort of softheaded optimist who can see no evil, especially in the mirror, and who hysterically insists on confusing goo with good. The story distilled Victorian sentiment to its treacly essence, and readers of all ages lapped it up. More than a million copies of Pollyanna were sold, and by 1920 the book had been made into a Broadway hit and a Hollywood movie starring Mary Pickford. Forty years later, with his infallible instinct for what will fill the public's sweet tooth. Walt Disney has taken Pollyanna off the back shelf and, at a cost of $3,200,000, has photographed the little horror in throbbing colors, bloated it with big names (Jane Wyman, Richard Egan, Adolphe Menjou. Karl Malden, Agnes Moorehead. Donald Crisp, Nancy Olson), and generally calculated its gasps and sniffles, homilies and heehaws with such shrewdness that Pollyanna emerges on the wide screen as the best live-actor movie Disney has ever made: a Niagara of drivel and a masterpiece of smarm.

The picture, with a few minor exceptions, sticks to the story like icing to a sugar bun. Pollyanna (Hayley Mills) is a poor little orphan girl, the eleven-year-old daughter of a kindly, idealistic clergyman who has "gone to heaven to be with mother" and left her in the British West Indies without "anybody but the Ladies Aid" and her Aunt Polly (Wyman), a middle-aged puckerpuss who lives all alone in a vast Victorian mansion somewhere east of the Mississippi and does good to her fellow townsfolk whether they like it or not. When Aunt Polly hears of her brother-in-law's death, she sets her thin lips and grimly agrees to take the girl in. "I know my duty . . . disagreeable as the task [will] be."

Polly arrives--a touching sight. Dressed in pitiful scraps "from the missionary barrel," she looks like a poor little match girl down to her last match. But underneath her rags she wears an impenetrable armor of cheerfulness that shines like pure rock candy. When Aunt Polly indifferently sends a maidservant (Olson) to meet her at the train. Pollyanna gurgles to the girl: "I'm glad . . . because now I've got her still coming, and I've got you besides!" When Aunt Polly coldly stows her away in a bare little bedroom in the attic, she runs to the window, takes in the view and simpers: "Oh. I'm so glad she let me have this room!" She's not really glad, she hastens to explain. She's just playing a game her father taught her, "the glad game." Object of the game: to find the silver lining in every cloud, the gold tooth in every shark. And Pollyanna plays the game with such a monstrous power of positive thinking that after two hours and 14 minutes under that relentless little ray of sunshine, the whole town she lives in is dissolved into a mile-wide meringue of mawkishness. At a big charity bazaar, they all sing America the Beautiful, and later somebody bursts out sobbing: "Just think! If she had never come to this town! We ought to get down on our knees and thank God for sending her!"

Millions of moviegoers will undoubtedly feel the same, but it would possibly be sufficient to thank Disney. With the mechanical bugs at last chased out of Disneyland, he has taken time to mount a period production that, from antimacassars to zinnias, is approximately perfect.

His director, David Swift, has made the most of a cast that includes some of the most skillful muggers now in the movies. But chief credit for the film's success belongs to 13-year-old Hayley Mills, the youngest member of what may at the moment be the most successful family in show business.* With her grace, intelligence and unstagy freshness, she has made the horrid little prig she plays seem almost as nice as the authoress intended her to be.

* Hayley's father, John Mills, is a well-known British cinemactor (Great Expectations, Tiger Bay); her mother, Mary Hayley Bell, is a successful British playwright (Men in Shadow, Duct for Two Hands); her 18-year-old sister, Juliet, is now playing on Broadway in Five Finger Exercise.

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