The New Pictures

Crack in the Mirror (20th Century-Fox) was produced by Darryl Zanuck, a great man for the special angle. As production boss of 20th Century-Fox, he made plenty of splash and cash with controversial pictures about insanity (The Snake Pit), anti-Semitism (Gentlemen's Agreement) and the color line (Pinky). Since setting up as an independent producer, he has made or sponsored films about interracial romance (Island in the Sun), impotence (The Sun Also Rises), homosexuality (Compulsion), and a man who was crazy about elephants (The Roots of Heaven). In Crack in the Mirror, a murder meller made in Paris, Zanuck introduces a daring economy measure: by assigning two roles to each of his principal players (Orson Welles, Juliette Greco, Bradford Dillman), he gets six actors for the price of three. Unhappily, since there is no real reason in the story why three characters should look like three others, the customers spend so much time wondering who's who that they may stop caring what's what.

The characters are arranged in two crudely congruent triangles. In the first, a back-street belle (Greco) shares her bed and board with a dirty old man (Welles) because he supports her illegitimate children. But now and then she likes a little excitement (Dillman) on the side. When the old man gets jealous, the young lovers strangle him, meat-saw the remains into portable pieces, and are caught when they try to dump the evidence at a construction site.

At this point the first triangle intersects the second, which is composed of a greying eminence (Welles) of the trial courts, his svelte young mistress (Greco), and her secret preference (Dillman), who happens to be the old man's legal assistant. The assistant is of course assigned to defend the meat-saw murderess, and after running around in triangles for an hour or so, the script comes at last to the predictable courtroom climax in which an awful lot of poetic justice is noisily done.

Justice, however, is not done in the screen credits, where Producer Zanuck, under the pseudonym, Mark Canfield, generously accepts full responsibility for the screenplay. Actually, it took eight writers besides Zanuck to make this complicated mess.

Masters of the Congo Jungle (International Scientific Foundation; 20th Century-Fox) is an anthropological documentary film that was sponsored by King Leopold III of Belgium and photographed in Ruanda-Urundi and the Congo by a team of German cameramen. It makes a sort of safari through the soul of primitive man. For most of the distance, a spectator is apt to have the disturbing sensation that he is traveling through an endless python.

The early part of the picture includes some striking shots of animal life : a balding aardvark that spoons ants out of an anthill with a sticky pink tongue almost two feet long ; an immense gorilla that one moment crashes through canebrake like an express train, and the next sits placidly sucking a palm stalk ; a vast herd of zebras plunging, as they plunge in Roy Campbell's vivid sonnet, "Barred with electric tremors through the grass/ Like wind along the gold strings of a lyre."

Among them all, as the camera watches, moves man: an animal among animals, swallowed in nature's hungry womb, nourished with nature's wisdom and delight. Like dye stains through a tissue, the patterns of nature seep through African society. The force of the volcano imbues the man who smokes a pipe. The passion of the wooing crane inflames the maid who imitates its mating dance. The example of the hornbill, a bird that jealously mud-walls its mate in a tree for as long as three months at a stretch, is incorporated in the marriage laws of the jungle tribes.

Out of the depths of nature also rise religious images and rituals of uncanny beauty and effectiveness. At one point the camera sits in a ring of savages inside a narrow, smoky lodge of woven vines, and watches a witch doctor fling a bag of oracular bones on the earthen floor and read their patterns as Confucius read the sacred stalks of yarrow. At another it investigates the religion of the pangolin, "the animal no one may hurt," an anteater that looks like a waddling artichoke and possesses some of the metaphysical properties of the rose: an image, for the Christian mystics, of the God within.

The Rat Race (Perlberg-Seaton; Paramount) is something for the rubbernecks who think New York is a great place to visit but would hate to live there--and never get tired of saying so. In this picture Scenarist Garson (Born Yesterday) Kanin, who also wrote the 1950 Broadway comedy that his script is borrowed from, feeds the out-of-town customers a mess of their own sour grapes, along with a generous helping of sex, sentiment, sadism and smartchat.

Kanin's hero (Tony Curtis) is a young sax maniac from Milwaukee who has come to Manhattan to blow the town down--he stands for Innocence. The heroine (Debbie Reynolds) is a hoofer who expected to wrap show business around her pretty little figure, but after two years of tryouts is still suckering sailors in a dime-a-dance hall--she stands for Experience. And the villain of the piece is the great big city, a sort of cold-water Sodom populated by pimps, prostitutes, land pirates, tourist trappers, gay young switchblades, softheaded bartenders and hard-nosed landlords.

Experience warns Innocence what to expect from the villain, but Innocence of course gets left with the hole in every doughnut and blithely keeps on buying Brooklyn Bridge until all his cash and even his saxophone are gone. The taxi dancer, who by this time is in love with the twerp, wants to put him back in the music business, but how can the poor girl make $200 to buy her jazzbo a new set of tubes? In New York, says Scriptwriter Kanin grimly, there is only one way a poor girl can make that kind of money. Will she do it? Will she let the villain sully her virtue and filet her soul? Hardly. Scriptwriter Kanin may find it good show business to exploit the dark alleys that lead off the Great White Way, but as a commercial moviemaker he also has a vested interest in the romantic (and highly lucrative) myth of Manhattan as the Great Good Place where everybody can get away from everything, where girls are willing, men are available, anything goes, and everybody winds up safely married and lives happily ever after.

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