The New Pictures

The World of Apu (Edward Harrison) completes, in alternations of suffering and joy, one of the most vital and abundant movies ever made. Based on a bestselling Bengali novel by Bibhuti Bannerji, the picture was written, produced and directed as three separate pictures by a 39-year-old Calcutta film buff named Satyajit Ray (pronounced Sawt-yaw-jit Rye). Each of the three lasts about an hour and 45 minutes and stands as a separate and complete cinema experience in its own right. But the moviemaker intended his trilogy ultimately to be seen and judged as a single immense discursive epic in the Indian tradition--as a modern Mahabharata.

Part 1, called Father Panchali (The Lament of the Path), describes the hero's childhood in the innocence and violence of a village in Bengal. Part 2, Aparajito (The Unvanquished), tells how he lost his father and left his mother in order to make himself a modern man. Part 3, called Apur Sansar (The World of Apu), begins with a slyly humorous description of how the young man (Soumitra Chatterjee) spends his can't-afford-salad days of bohemian genius in Calcutta's slums. Suddenly one day a college friend carts him off to a country wedding that has an unexpected and fateful conclusion. The bridegroom proves to be insane, and in order to save the bride (Sarmila Tagore*) from the curse that will fall upon her if she is not married at the appointed hour, Apu makes the noble gesture and marries her himself. To his amazement he falls in love with the girl, and for a year they live a garret idyl in Calcutta. Then she dies in childbirth. Almost insane with grief, Apu throws his novel, his career and almost his life away, but he finds himself again in his relation to his son, in his duty to the future, in his love of life.

As a piece of craftsmanship, The World of Apu is the finest film of the three. Director Ray, who had never turned a camera before he started shooting Father Panchali, began his trilogy with incredible strokes of beginner's luck, but he ends it with deliberate mastery of the medium. He has superb control of his camera. His images are continuously beautiful but never obtrusive; they rise out of the story as naturally as thoughts rise out of the pool of Vishnu--there is nothing arty in Ray's art. By the same token his actors act, not with the usual bombinations of Oriental drama, but as though the camera had found them alone and simply living; and they live, as few characters in pictures do, real lives that swell to the skin with pain and poetry and sudden mother wit. Actor Chatterjee, as a young man too gifted to be strong, provides an unforgettable object of the Biblical lesson (Luke 16:8): ". . . the children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light." And Actress Tagore, though she looks as mysterious and lovely as an Apsaras, nevertheless comes off the screen as a lustily healthy young woman, essentially down to earth and up to tricks.

Director Ray reveals moreover an order of poetic insight and a gift of visual anecdote that combine to produce some astonishing effects. In one scene the tenderness and bliss of a whole honeymoon are pressed into a moment when the young husband wakes in the same bed he had used as a bachelor and, listening to his bride as she cheerfully makes breakfast, lifts in silent wonder from beside his pillow one of her fallen hairpins.

Taken as a whole, Ray's film has the generosity and the prodigal variety of genius. Nevertheless, to moviegoers accustomed to the visual shorthand of Hollywood's cliches, it will probably seem sometimes to maunder in Oriental obscurities, to go the long way round to nowhere. Ray might well reply that life itself usually takes the same route and reaches the same destination, and this movie is obviously intended to be like life--not like other movies.

High Time (20th Century-Fox) is a fast flashy funny 103-minute $3,000,000 CinemaScope De Luxe Color parody of an old-fashioned college musical, released just in time to catch the back-to-school business. It stars Bing Crosby--back on campus as a 51-year-old freshman. He is the owner of a chain of 1,433 restaurants who decides to let somebody else mind the store while he gets the education he could not afford as a boy.

Bing's undergraduate experience is presented in four acts, each describing one of the four years of college. The first three years rush along, like a well-executed locomotive yell, at a relentlessly accelerating rate of rah-rah and haha, and if the last year somehow loses momentum, it does not much matter--the audience needs a rest by that time anyway. Bing gives it the old college try, and if he cannot sing so well as he used to or act any better than he ever did, that does not much matter either. A younger generation--represented mainly by France's Nicole Maurey, by a sort of Elvis Presley with muscles called Fabian, and by a starlet known as Tuesday Weld, who displays at least as much acting ability as Monday Wash--takes over with plenty of energy, if not much style. And Director Blake Edwards runs the show with all sorts of technical razzle-dazzle: the wide-screen wipes are a clever touch, the hurry-ups are corny but funny, and some of the blackouts are just great.

Carry On, Nurse (Anglo-Amalgamated; Governor Films). "Good heavens, no!" the male patient sputters shyly to the two young nurses who propose to remove his drawers. "I'll do it myself if you don't mind.'' They do mind, and with Amazonian zest they pants the poor chap and dump him in the sack. "There now," one of them remarks, "what a fuss--about such a little thing!"

The incident sets a standard that the rest of this bedpan farce from Britain rarely tries to rise above. The picture begins with a pubic shave, continues with a ceremony involving a suppository, settles down to some steady vomiting, wakes up with a scene full of toilet-paper streamers.

The humor of these situations may largely be lost on people who have successfully completed their toilet training, but the phenomenal popularity of Carry On, Nurse would suggest that they are not in the majority. Produced for less than $250,000, the film last year made more money ($1,400,000) than any other picture exhibited in England, and in international distribution it smashed house records from Stockholm to Singapore. Offered to Manhattan's pickity midtown exhibitors, Carry On, Nurse was thumbsed down as "one of those British jokes that nobody here will get." So it opened in Los Angeles without benefit of New York reviews, and there, after 27 weeks in the same theater, it is still going strong. It is still going strong in Denver and St. Louis (17 weeks), in Boston (16 weeks), in Chicago (16 weeks), in Dallas (15 weeks), in Milwaukee (12 weeks). Across the U.S., in fact, it has already netted its distributors more than $1,000,000 in film rentals alone, and will probably triple that total. Gross earnings, cash across the counter, are expected to approach $10 million.

The end, moreover, is not yet. Carry On, Nurse is just one of a series of sillies (Carry On, Sergeant; Carry On, Teacher; Carry On, Constable) that Anglo-Amalgamated plans to release in the U.S. and seems prepared to carry on indefinitely.

* A distant relation of Sir Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengalese poet who died in 1941.

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