The New Pictures

Under Ten Flags (Dino de Laurentiis; Paramount), a somewhat better than fair sea-fight thriller, brings back to the screen the most feared man ever to wear the uniform of a British sailor. As Captain Bligh, Charles Laughton roasted the barnacles off Fletcher Christian 25 years ago, and he is still awesome as he bites off his words, chews them three times and then spits them out as if he did not like the taste. This time, as befits his age and rancor, Actor Laughton is a shore-based admiral who, toward the beginning of World War II. directs the Royal Navy's search for a particularly destructive German submarine.

What frustrates him for months is that the raider is not a U-boat at all, but a heavily armed surface vessel well disguised as a merchantman. The raider, the Atlantis, flies whatever flag is convenient, and carries its sham to the point of decking seamen out as female passengers--wigs, parasols and all. When a target is sighted, the Atlantis steams close by, runs up the swastika and lowers the false packing cases which hide its guns. The raider's captain, played by Van Heflin, is a gentleman who, in his student days, rowed against Cambridge, and he tries his best to fight a decent war.

Gallantry is spread rather thickly by all hands--Laughton gives grudging tribute to his unseen opponent. Heflin behaves nobly to his captives--and eventually it becomes a little tiresome, even though the viewer knows that it is based on fact. (The German raider Atlantis bedeviled Allied shipping for most of 1940-41, and its captain--now NATO Admiral Bernhard Rogge--was so humane to his prisoners that some of them still correspond with him.) Eventually, the Atlantis is caught and sent to the bottom. The film, for all of Laughton's inspired snorting and Heflin's underplayed "Fire one . . . Fire two," is not as taut a ship as it should be. The reason may be that Director Duilio Coletti has paid too much attention to civilian foolishness, notably that of Prisoner Mylene Demongeot, a blonde who billows like the ocean and is so amply constructed that she cannot fasten her life jacket.

The End of Innocence (Argentine Sono Film; Kingsley) is a shadowed, subtle, intense study of purity, sin and degeneracy. A shy, beautiful girl (Elsa Daniel) comes to adolescence in the Argentina of the late '20s. A fanatically puritanical mother has kept Ana from worldly knowledge in the most rigid Latin-American tradition. She is not allowed to see even her own nakedness--she wears a smock when she bathes. Her nanny describes flatly the penalty for unmentioned sins: "Your body will burn for evermore."

Her imagination has already begun to kindle. Not knowing why, she kisses a male cousin, then nervously examines pictures thrust at her by street boys. Abruptly the world is darkened. Director Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, a Swedish-descended Argentine, shows his debt to Sweden's Ingmar Bergman in simple scenes that to Ana take on a cast of evil--an old woman rapping angrily on a window with her crutch, a man's black-trousered legs visible beneath a mansion gate.

An idealistic young politician named Aguirre (Lautaro Murua) becomes the agent of sin. He delivers an emotional speech on freedom of the press, then learns from a sneering member of the opposition that his own father protected his fortune by silencing newspapers that opposed him. Sickened by the revelation, he nevertheless challenges his opponent to a duel, which is to take place at the estate of Ana's father, an aristocrat who reveres honor and gloats over death. On the night before the duel, Aguirre, overcome by his sudden knowledge of meaninglessness, seduces Ana. She longs for him to die, but he kills his man. And so Ana and the politician are bound together. Director Nilsson has tried, with considerable success, to express in 76 minutes much more than can be stated explicitly in that time. His film bears a heavy load of symbolism, of scenes such as the one in which swinish revelers set fire to one lavish apartment and then reel off drunkenly to another. Visions of a society's dying past and corrupt present unfold themselves long after the film is over. It is not society, however, but Actress Daniel's journey from innocence to disillusion that is the core of the story, and her thoroughly convincing portrayal ensures that the viewer's most vivid memory is of the girl Ana.

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