The New Pictures

The Subterraneans (Arthur Freed; M-G-M). The bushy-bearded Beat Generation is a collective hair farm that the average solid citizen does not dig. Nevertheless, in this picture, which bears about as much relation to Jack Kerouac's novel as Hollywood does to Endsville, Producer Arthur Freed attempts to sell the beatniks back to the mass culture they are desperately and often comically trying to escape. He shaves them down, scrubs them up and presents them, in deadly earnest, as pioneers in the great American tradition, as "The Young Bohemians . . . the makers of the future." Unhappily, the notion is so translucently ludicrous and the picture so poorly put together that in box-office terms all this cold-water flattery will probably get the moviemakers nowhere.

The story is set in San Francisco, the holy city of hip, and describes how a young cube (George Peppard), who lives with his ever-loving mother and writes nothing novels, sees something sweet where the beat meet to eat. In the book she is a pretty Negro, but in the film she is Leslie Caron. "I want every bit of life," he announces. So they go to her pad and really make the scene, and in the morning he drives her over to see her analyst. Soon they are sharing the same toothbrush, but he wants to write, and one night he flobs off to somebody else's pad. She flips but good, and goes ankling down the main drag with nothing on but her epidermis. In the end, though, she announces that she is pregnant, and he promises to marry her, get a job, straighten up and fly right back to bourgeois respectability.

In short the film is basically just a remake of La Boheme with a happy ending and bop instead of Puccini. And though it is at no time authentically beat, it has one thing in common with the beats: dullness.

The Mountain Road (William Goetz; Columbia) allows James Stewart, as a U.S. Army major*; wrestling with his first command, to explore the proposition that power not only corrupts, but embarrasses, confuses and dismays. The casting is logical, since durable Actor Stewart has grown wealthy by relentlessly registering embarrassment, confusion and dismay on the screen. Major Stewart's predicament in the film is more serious than usual. It is 1944, his seven-man demolition team is the last garrison of an airfield in southeast China, and the Japanese are advancing 40 miles away. Radioed orders pass the buck; the major may withdraw his men by plane, or blow up the airfield and retreat west by truck, destroying the area's only road behind him.

Aviation is clearly the better part of valor, but Stewart chooses the hard way. The demolition unit touches off the field and moves out with four trucks, a quantity of dynamite and--combat veterans will relish the realism here--a beautiful Chinese refugee girl. As they rumble through menacing mountain country (ably portrayed by a forbidding chunk of Arizona), Stewart shambles, stammers, scuffs his feet and advises the girl (played by Lisa Lu, a onetime Honolulu Advertiser reporter) that he finds China baffling. The girl, a Radcliffe graduate, replies with a not particularly scrutable line, possibly cribbed from Philosophy I: "There are too many of us for mercy."

At first, although the character of the Chinese remains as opaque as egg foo yung to him, the major handles his command well enough. When a bridge must be blown up he blows it, although the action strands thousands of refugees. Eventually the girl leaves him, though she loves him. In an overexplicit curtain speech, Stewart says contritely that he has learned the bitter lesson of power.

What psychological sense the film retains from the Theodore White novel of the same name is waterlogged, if not drowned, by too much hokum and handwringing. The best moments are those in which the enlisted men, having no heroics to perform, slouch about coated with dust and disgust.

Bells Are Ringing (Arthur Freed; M-G-M). In this $3,000,000 Metrocolored musical based on her Broadway boff of 1956, Judy Holliday employs her limited vocal resources with showmanly style, supports them with a comic gift that is a major wonder of the entertainment world, and with some skillful assistance from Director Vincente (Gigi) Minnelli manages to jog and jazz and jigger a merely middling book and some fairly forgettable tunes into one of the year's liveliest and wittiest cinemusicals.

Judy plays a switchboard spinster who works for an outfit called Susanswerphone and lives by listening in--and sometimes horning in--on the lives of the company's clients. When destiny turns a deaf ear, Judy listens to the troubles (and the tunes) of a desperate dentist who aspires to be a songwriter and composes ("I love your sunny teeth") on his air hose. But she bestows her most tender loving care on "Plaza oh double four double three (Dean Martin), a playboy playwright. Operator Holliday eventually makes a person-to-person connection, and after several sorts of trouble with the vice squad (the detectives want to know what sort of calls Susanswerphone answers), manages to deliver the message ("I love you") and get a return ring.

The beauty of Judy Holliday's talent lies not least in her meticulous control of it. She knows her type to a tee-hee, and she is never for an instant out of character. Actually, she plays two characters at once: 1) Dumb Dora, the sort of sweet schlemiel who continually falls on her face but always comes up covered with roses, and 2) Dora's diabolical double, a cute cookie who secretly prearranges the roses and from time to time winks wickedly at the audience. She plays both parts brilliantly in Bells, especially in the brief blackout that describes a disastrous blind date. In a rapid succession of hilarious Freudian slips, Judy bends the young man's cigarette to a limp parabola, splatters his drink on his lap, butts him with her head and finally, as she brushes by a blazing dish of crepes suzette, goes up in flames.

* In real life, Brigadier General Stewart, U.S.A.F. Reserve.

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