The New Pictures

Surprise Package (Columbia) is stuffed with expensive ingredients: Yul Brynner MItzi Gaynor, Noel Coward in front of the camera Director Stanley (Seven Brides for Seven Brothers) Donen behind it plus a script by Harry (Reclining Figure} Kurnitz based on a novel (A Gift from the Boys} by Columnist Art Buchwald. But as far as entertainment is concerned, Package contains only what is known in show business as a bomb Director Donen clearly intended to tell a shaggy-dog story the way John Huston did in his hilarious Beat the Devil but unfortunately, Donen's dog turns out to be all bark and no bite. The hero (Brynner) 'is a big-time hood deported from the U.S. to his native Greece and confined by the Greek government to a small Aegean island. The story evolves around his attempt to get back in the money by relieving an exiled king Noel Coward) of his million-dollar crown. Revolving ever more tediously, it goes down the drain in a clutter of words-Package is perhaps the year's talkiest talkie Coward: "It's amazing how a girl so dumb that if you say hello she's stuck for an answer can reel off a three-hour lecture on why wild mink is better." Brynner, contemplating a statue of a discus thrower: What sort of a country is dis? Puttin up a monument of a guy stealin' hubcaps!"

Weddings and Babies (Morris Engel Associates), as a technical exercise in cinema is one of the most exciting feature films the U.S. has produced in a decade. Shot mostly on Manhattan's Lower East side the picture was photographed, directed and partly written by Morris Engel, a shoestring independent whose 1953 movie, The Little Fugitive, scored a solid commercial success in the U.S., and in France made a cultural splash that helped to kick up the New Wave of creativity in French fiIms (TIME. Nov. 16, 1959).

Weddings' hero is a small-tirne commercial photographer (John Myhers) who lives in his store-front studio in the Village and shares his cot with his "model" (Viveca Lindfors). She keeps nagging him to marry her, he keeps dodging. Underneath the usual evasions lies, of course the usual fear of life, but he'll be damned if he's going to open that can of worms. ) they bicker, make up, get engaged take his mother (Chiarina Barile) to an old folks home, trail her all over town when she runs away, bicker, break up. The crisis comes, their lives turn on a instant when the hero, wandering through a vast metropolitan cemetery in search of his fathers grave, understands that he must choose between life, personified in the girl he loves, and death, embodied in the mother he must leave.

The moment is anything but soap-operatic. The moviegoer suddenly finds himself wandering in the hero's personal hell and realizes not altogether happily that Engel's picture, most serious when it smiles is essentially a mordant reanimation of Orpheus--on Tenth Street.

Yet the story of Weddings is less important than the way it is told. Director Engel has attempted a sort of "candid cinema,' in which the principles of art are continuously (and sometimes unfortunately) subordinated to the flow of life. He often throws away his working script' encourages his actors to improvise. Then he moves around them with a portable camera and tracks the action as it develops, catching this, missing that, taking his chances and riding his luck.

Engel's luck is not always good. In many frames the camera cannot seem to find the speaker, and when it does cannot focus on his face. To give his picture a life like look, Engel uses no light except sunlight, so the film is sometimes muzzy sometimes (after a sudden change of sky) faulted with flare. Much of the time the actors' voices, picked up on the spot by a tape recorder, are muffled diffuse interrupted by bed squeaks, foot scrapes, street noises. But the sound is the sound the rooms have the look, the camera shares the confusion of real life. And real life as though aroused and released by Engel's trust in it, wells up in the faces and voices and movements of the actors in the professionals, Lindfors and Myhers no less than in the immigrant woman, Mrs. Barile, who was discovered sitting on her front steps on Sullivan Street few days after shooting started, and who died without seeing the finished film. Real life again and again galvanizes the spectator with its unreasonable significance, disheveled perfection, artless art.

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