The New Pictures

Butterfield 8 (MGM) as a novel by John O'Hara was a crude but affecting tart's tragedy. As a film, it has been turned into a sleek and libidinous lingerie meller.

In the book, which was based on the 1931 real-life tragedy of a gay young thing who called herself Starr Faithfull, the heroine was a semiprofessional call girl, with a phone on Manhattan's BUtterfield exchange. In the movie, she is just an enthusiastic amateur (Elizabeth Taylor) who promiscuously offers peace to the tired businessman. In the book, the hero was a middle-aged commuter with a careless habit of making women and missing trains. In the movie, he is a handsome young casualty of the battle for status, a poor boy (Laurence Harvey) who got rich quick by marrying the boss's daughter (Dina Merrill) and has felt like a kept man ever since. One night when the wife is out of town, hero meets heroine in one of the better bistros, takes her home. To his amazement, the heroine ''goes off like a rocket," and neither of them quite comes down to earth. Infatuation changes to something like love, and for a few days love appears to have plucked these brands from the burning. In the end, though, censorship conquers all. She pays the wages of sin; he makes peace with his wife and promises to make a man of himself--well, anyway, an organization man.

Even in these conventional contexts, the classic theme of salvation by prostitution preserves a little of its ancient power. The power is blunted--though commerce is served--by a glossy production (Pandro S. Berman), slick direction (Daniel Mann), solid but stolid performances, and a script (Charles Schnee and John Michael Hayes) that reads as though it had been copied off a washroom wall. Heroine to hero, with a broad wink, as she glides seductively down the hatch of his sailboat: "You can--uh--drop anchor any time." Motel proprietor to hero, who betrays a certain anxiety to get to bed with heroine: "Yeah, yeah. Man's gotta get his rest--an' he's gotta get it regular. Ha-ha!" Haha.

General della Rovere (Zebra-Gaumont; Continental) is a quickie that almost became a masterpiece. Shot, cut and canned in 33 days of cost-trimming, brain-fagging labor, it is by all odds the best picture made by Italy's Roberto Rossellini since Open City (1945) and Paisan (1946). It restores Rossellini, after eleven years of private enterprise (Ingrid Bergman, Sonali das Gupta) and artistic calamity (Stromboli, A Trip to Italy, Europe '51), to his rightful but qualified eminence as a cinema natural who shoots movies the way other men shoot dice--when he's cold he just craps out. but when he's hot he can make his point the hard way.

The plot of General della Rovere (pronounced Roh-veh-reh) is developed from a well-known incident of World War II. As Rossellini tells the tale. Della Rovere, attached to the anti-Fascist provisional government of Marshal Badoglio, is landed behind the retreating Germans in Italy to coordinate partisan activity with Allied operations. Before he can even contact the underground, a German patrol intercepts and kills him. The Wehrmacht's chief of military police (Hannes Messemer) thereupon evolves a crafty ploy: he puts a double of Della Rovere in prison with some civilians held for interrogation, waits for the partisan commander, believed to be among the impounded civilians, to make contact with the phony general and thus identify himself.

The general is impersonated by an amiable but trivial swindler (Vittorio De Sica), a three-time loser who is scared witless of what might happen to him if he fails to discover the partisan commander. He plays his part superbly, impressing the other prisoners with kindliness and a show of implacable resistance to the Germans. Unexpectedly, they impress him too. For all the moral squalor and spineless self-indulgence of his life, the swindler is a man of feeling. His heart is wrung by the notes he reads on the walls of his cell--the last pathetic scribbles of young men about to face a firing squad.

Then one day, partly because of his involvement with the phony general, one of these brave men is tortured. Rather than face a second interrogation, he kills himself. Convulsed with grief and guilt, the little swindler protests pathetically to the chief of police. The chief gives him a taste of torture, too. That does it. The petty criminal stops playing the part of a hero and begins to live it. His end is heroic, almost unbearably moving.

As craftsmanship, General della Rovere is not particularly impressive. Technically, Rossellini at his best is a slambang, hey-look-the-bell-rang sort of director. He uses a camera as if it were a machine gun--spray it around, boys, you're bound to get something--and when he cuts a film, he hacks it up like so much Italian bologna. But in this picture Rossellini is supported by a vigorous script, and by De Sica, an actor who marvelously draws revelations out of the hero's emptiness, as a magician draws a skein of brilliant scarves out of a fool's mouth. Even more strongly, Rossellini is supported in General della Rovere by the same theme--war as the ordeal in which a man discovers, through suffering, the love that makes him a human being--that runs through all his finest films like a hot red artery of meaning. And in this film the meaning is deepened and enriched by a significant circumstance: the man who dies for his fellow man is not, conventionally speaking, a good man, not even an ordinary man, but a common criminal. On Rossellini's Calvary, the redeemer and the thief are one.

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