The New Pictures

Germany Year Zero (Superfilm) is the latest completed work of Producer-Director Roberto Rossellini, the best-known moviemaker' of the Italian postwar movie renaissance, which has produced films noted for their graphic realism and flamboyantly sentimental ideas. The reputation of Rossellini (Open City, Paisan) is based on the sharp break his films make with the theater. By concentrating on life as it looks outside theaters, he has discredited the old vocabulary of strained gesture, studio-built set, and self-conscious lighting that the movies inherited from their respected ancestor.

The traditional movie follows the stage practice of simplifying and ordering life for the spectator's benefit. Rossellini's trademarks--nervous editing, off-center composition, the camera moving faster than the figure and often at a tangent to it--are aimed at approximating the uneasy experience of the human eye, which never quite catches or catalogues everything in its path. In his mimicry of actuality, the point of focus shifts widely and illogically, the actors are in constant motion, of their talk is whirling on at a great speed, falling or rising in intonation so that the audience is not sure whether it is meant to be heard or not.

Rossellini writes his script while his camera turns, recruits his cast from the streets where he happens to be working, asks his amateur actors to invent the dialogue for a particular episode. Working rapidly and inexpensively, as usual, Rossellini completed Germany in 40 days, at a shoestring cost of $115,000.

The tearjerking story: a spindly twelve-year-old (Edmund Meschke) cracks up under the strain of trying to get food for a family of three adults during the early days of the German occupation. Rossellini's liking for dime-novel situations merely discolors his genius for capturing the spontaneity and worn texture of street scenes and everyday people involved in such everyday activities as dressing, walking, opening doors, chasing streetcars.

In his earlier Paisan and Open City, Rossellini convinced some moviegoers that he had one eye on the U.S. box office and one foot in Moscow. His sentimentally heroic G.I.s spouted a hamburger American, orated long-windedly against Negro prejudice and cried in bed over the degradation of Italian women. In Germany his Berliners are less editorialized, tougher and more real people.

Rossellini is an uneven director, but he is a master at picturing shabby living. His shot of a family walking to the father's burial, the girls in their short black dresses, wobbling on platform shoes, has the forlorn dignity of a Chaplin ending, plus a less calculated pathos.

The Secret Garden (MGM) is another misty-eyed yarn for kiddies based on Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1909 semi-classic. The story is still heavily sentimental, but it makes one realistic and amusing point: children can sometimes be a thoroughly nasty lot.

The nastiness is touched off when a poor little orphan (Margaret O'Brien) goes to live with her rich, half-mad uncle (Herbert Marshall). An officious, adder-tongued little minx who detests practically everyone she meets, Margaret soon meets her match. Her crippled cousin (Dean Stockwell) turns out to be the same sort of brat. In the tantrum match that follows, the two youngsters give themselves (and the audience) a crashing good time yowling, screeching and smashing what appears to be a gross of studio crockery.

Thereafter, as Margaret and Dean get sweeter, the hokum gets thicker and the film duller. Together with a little Yorkshire lad (Brian Roper), they discover a mysterious walled-up garden and start remaking it into a brilliantly Technicolored bower. They also succeed in reclaiming crusty old Herbert Marshall for a sunny, tear-washed finale.

A good deal of care and talent have been lavished on the Garden. Aside from Principals O'Brien and Stockwell, who handle their tears and tantrums with equal facility, there are good performances by Herbert Marshall, Elsa Lanchester as a chuckleheaded Yorkshire maid, and Reginald Owen as a grumpy old gardener.

Under Capricorn (Transatlantic Pictures; Warner) puts Ingrid Bergman to work under one of the heaviest handicaps of her career. At best, the story is a florid historical romance; at its worst it is little better than hysterical drugstore fiction. Even tricked out with Technicolor and the skillfully elegant direction of Alfred Hitchcock, if remains a tedious and dispiriting yarn.

Like a purple spotlight, the plot is trained remorselessly on the sins and sufferings of a beautiful Irish aristocrat (Miss Bergman). Besides being a great lady, she is also a fratricide, a moral coward and a tosspot. Ingrid is supposed to make this heroine seem an appealing damsel in distress. The appeal, despite beautiful efforts, remains largely potential. The distress comes through without relief, mostly in long, pale-lipped monologues and maudlin confessions.

Chief witnesses of the Bergman suffering are Joseph Gotten, her surly husband, and Michael Wilding, a foppish gallant who plays her father confessor. The evil housekeeper, a stock character made popular by Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, is well played by Margaret Leighton.

Blue Lagoon (J. Arthur Rank; Universal-International) is a British import which might better have been dropped in the South Pacific, where much of it was filmed. Purporting to be a South Sea-romance, it is actually about as long-winded and emotionally fogbound as a Norse saga.

Beginning with the rusty old excuse of a fire at sea, Lagoon beaches two little British tykes, aged seven and eight, on a deserted, gorgeously Technicolored island. Twelve years later, the girl (Jean Simmons) and boy (Donald Houston) are still trying to thumb a ride back to civilization. Meanwhile they have put together an attractive, cabana-type dwelling in a palm tree, a charming dinner set out of coconut shells and assorted Polynesian oddments, and some fetching tree-bark sarongs for Jean. Unfortunately for the audience, the young couple has long since run out of anything interesting to talk about.

To fill in this awkward gap, the script provides them with a full agenda of crises --including an underwater fight with an octopus and a breathless, if somewhat belated, discovery of sex. As a climax, nine months later there is a bang-up doubleheader, featuring a hurricane and the birth of their first child. All of this is obviously something that shouldn't happen to a barracuda, let alone a talented young actress like Jean Simmons.

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