The New Pictures

The Virgin Spring (Svensk Filmindustri: Janus), the latest work of Ingmar Bergman (TIME, March 14), is a violently beautiful miracle play, an apocalyptic parable in which good and evil, Christian and pagan powers collaborate in a divine rebirth, the continuous nativity of love.

Derived from a ghastly-lovely medieval ballad (Toeres dotter i Vaenge), the film tells the story of two sisters, one dark (Gunnel Lindblom) and one fair (Birgitta Pettersson), one serving Wotan and the other Christ, one sunk in nature and the other lost in light. The dark sister hates the fair sister, and one morning, when the two girls ride together through the forest to bring candles to the village church, the dark sister secretly opens the fair sister's bread and slips a toad inside. Then, in the depths of the forest, she turns back and lets her sister go on alone.

Soon the fair sister meets three hungry goatherds. When she offers to share her bread with them, the toad jumps out. "The herdsmen three," the ballad continues, "took her to wife/ And then from her they took her life./ Her body in the mire they lay/ And with her garments went away." That night the murderers take shelter at a farmhouse, unaware that the farm belongs to the father (Max von Sydow) of their victim. When they offer to sell him the girl's garments, he slaughters them like the animals they are. Then he rushes through the forest to his daughter's corpse.

"God!" the father cries aloud, wrenching his face to heaven, "you saw it! The death of the innocent child and my revenge. You allowed it! I don't understand you." In despair and atonement he vows to build a church of stone with his own hands on the spot where his daughter died. "I know no other way to be reconciled with my own hands. I know no other way to live." At that instant, a spring gushes out of the ground beneath the daughter's head. The father--and the Wotan-worshiping sister--fall on their knees to receive the miraculous water of life.

This holy and horrible Gothic tale cannot of course be understood as a story of real men and women in real situations.

Like the ballad that inspired it. The Virgin Spring is a myth, and as a myth it is treated in this film. Bergman's style, usually subtle and allusive, is startlingly simple. The script, written under Bergman's supervision by Novelist Ulla Isaksson, who also did the screenplay for Brink of Life, is as clear and grave as a Mass. The actors, as always finely disciplined by Bergman, behave as formally as acolytes. The photography is as beautiful as it generally is in Bergman's pictures, but if anything more plain--there are very few cute shots to catch the eye. In the European version of the film the scenes of rape and murder are direct, unmitigated, appalling. In the U.S. version the scenes are, in effect, castrated by false modesty, and as a result they tease the imagination instead of smiting the heart. The damage to the film is serious, considerably diminishing the moral impact of Bergman's principal point: the way to God lies through the valley of the shadow of death, and in that valley all men tremble.

Village of the Damned (M-G-M). One fine day at precisely 10:57 a.m., every living thing in the pleasant village of Midwich in the south of England suddenly and for no apparent reason drops senseless where it sits or stands, and lies as if dead. A mason jack-knifes over a wheelbarrow; a cow collapses in a field. What has happened? No gas, no radiation is detectable. Then all at once, as swiftly as it struck, the mysterious interdiction lifts. The villagers, the cows, the birds awake. They all feel chilly, but retain no memory of their inexplicable experience, and seem to suffer no aftermath.

The aftermath is merely delayed. Two months later it becomes apparent to the village doctor that every Midwich woman of fertile years is pregnant--apparently without the assistance of a man. What, the village wonders, was responsible for the mysterious impersonal rape of Midwich. for this ominous plural parthenogenesis? What great beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Midwich to be born?

Many U.S. moviegoers will never learn the fascinating answers to these peculiar questions. Apparently assuming that a picture with only one star (George Sanders) of second magnitude could not possibly be any good, M-G-M is hustling Village around the neighborhood circuits without even bothering to give it a Broadway sendoff. It is missing a good bet. Based on a clever thriller (The Midwich Cuckoos) by John Wyndham and made in Britain for about $500,000, Village is one of the neatest little horror pictures produced since Peter Lorre went straight.

Gl Blues (Paramount), the first movie made by Elvis Presley since his release from the U.S. Army (TIME, March 14), might be expected to answer one of the less pressing questions confronting the U.S. public: Did the Army make a man of him? Maybe so, but it sure didn't make him an actor.

The addition of two years and the subtraction of ten pounds (Uncle Sam shaved off his sideburns) seem to have effected precious little difference in the Tennessee tomcat. At 25 he still looks 17, still holds his li'l ole "gweetar" at crotch level and lets the spasms run through his legs while his eyes glaze and unintelligible phrases spurt from his doll-baby mouth. Between ballads he still looks like the hero of a girl's school Hamlet.

Even Elvis deserves a better script than he gets in this sniggery little dogface farce. The G.I. hero (Presley) is stationed, as Elvis was, in Germany; and he has, as Elvis had, more "frowlines" than he can find time for. Then of course he meets the girl he can't have, a hoofer (Juliet Prowse) in a Frankfurt Kabarett, and makes a bet he can "get his foot in the door" before the week is out. He wins the bet, loses the girl, wins her back at the fade. Time and again the scriptwriters run out of ideas, and whenever that happens Elvis just hauls off and belts a ballad. There are ten of them, and every last one is goshawful. The dialogue is not much better. She: "How can I ever repay you?" He: "Oh, I'll think of something."

Actress Prowse, a sort of Leslie Caron with vitamins, is absolutely out of place in this picture. She looks human.

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