The New Pictures

Pinky (20th Century-Fox) is the most ambitious and costly of this season's crop of Negro-problem films--including Home of the Brave and Lost Boundaries. Pinky was finished after its B-budgeted rivals had proved at the box office that the public is interested in movies that give serious treatment to a serious theme, e.g., the sorry plight of the U.S. Negro. Partly because it puts entertainment above soap-boxing, Darryl Zanuck's sleek movie is head & shoulders above its predecessors both as entertainment and propaganda.

Despite its high Hollywood gloss, the story is told with considerable honesty and understated force. It will therefore doubtless irritate both professional Southerners and professional champions of racial equality. Back to her native South goes a white-skinned Negro girl (Jeanne Grain), who has "passed" in the North while studying nursing. In her home town, she is first terrified, then furious, at the treatment she gets as a Negro. It is not long until she comes close to being robbed by a fellow Negro, and raped by white men. Torn between running back North to her white doctor fiance (William Lundigan) and devoting her life to educating Negro nurses in the South, Pinky finds a solution that is no pat answer to any of the broad problems the picture raises.

The movie concentrates so relentlessly on Pinky's personal anguish that it achieves a haunting character portrait. Acting the role with an un-greasepainted face, Jeanne Grain seems like a morbid, almost marbleized Sleeping Beauty, bewitched by her conflict. Director Elia (Gentleman's Agreement) Kazan underlines the impression by having her walk with a dreamy gait, usually against the wind. As Pinky's washerwoman grandmother, Ethel Waters gives a powerful performance.

Kazan has directed an artfully balanced script (by Dudley Nichols and Philip Dunne) with a heavy poetic atmosphere and shrewd attention to dramatic detail. He has pumped conflict into every scene and sustained the excitement throughout even the talky stretches.

By daring to suggest that some Negroes may be villains--and some white Southerners decent men--Pinky will annoy those who insist on their propaganda with easy good & evil labels. Anyone who is determined to look for the cliches of antidiscrimination propaganda might charge that the sour-sweet old plantation owner (Ethel Barrymore) is a "symbol" of white paternalism and the Ethel Waters role a "symbol" of Aunt Jemimaism. But Pinky is the most skillful type of propaganda: in avoiding crude and conventional labeling, it leaves a strong impression that racial discrimination is not only unreasonable but evil.

Thieves' Highway (20th Century-Fox) is a flashy, second-rate film with a simple, violent story. On his first haul, a fruit trucker (Richard Conte) foils some market thieves, avenges a robbery of his father, sells his apples at a profit and gets the girl. The movie makes no pretentions to anything but entertainment; its only message, if any: think twice before going into the fruit-trucking trade. There have been better trucking movies (They Drive By Night), but none so fast or so violent. Most spectacular shot: Millard Mitchell burning alive in the remains of his rickety truck. Most surprising scene: the flagrant cruelty of the hero as he unmercifully slugs a flabby villain who doesn't want to fight. After breaking an ax handle on the villain's hand, Conte mauls him from one end of a bar to the other with a series of rabbit punches, each of which sounds like the cracking of a dinosaur's knuckle.

It may be, from internal evidence in Thieves' Highway, that the Johnston Office is letting down the bars on what is and is not censorable. In this movie a prostitute (Valentina Cortesa) wins the hero from the-girl-back-home with whom he had been violently in love only two days earlier. Besides this reversal of Hollywood tradition, there is an excessively steamy love scene between Cortesa and Conte after an excessively cute game of ticktacktoe on his left pectoral.

Director Jules (Naked City) Dassin is a realist with a varnished style that switches from arty to operatic to documentary. His highway scenes give a sense of speeding movement and the ominous effect on the driver of cars hurtling past in a metallic rhythm. Occasionally he turns in a totally authentic shot, e.g., an oatmeal-grey Sunday morning in the produce market, the street forlorn and empty except for some work-worn truckers sitting on crates eating watermelon.

Dassin's erratic direction of actors produces some mixed results: Morris Car-novsky's generalized flourishes as a once-happy Greek, Lee Cobb's flabby, badly timed portrait of a marketeer, Millard Mitchell's hard-bitten acting of a tired truck driver. The Italian glitter girl, Valentina Cortesa, seems a likely candidate for the top-salaried star bracket. In the role of a waterfront fixture, she looks like an unemployed countess, but she spikes the role with a sweater-girl figure, viva-ciousness and great self-assurance.

Savage Splendor (RKO Radio) is a magnificent Technicolored record of an African safari, filmed by Armand Denis (who eleven years ago produced Dark Rapture) and Lewis Cotlow. To make it, the Denis-Cotlow expedition traveled some 22,000 miles back & forth across

Africa, visited half a dozen native tribes, tussled with scores of exotic birds & beasts. Their bag was some of the most beautiful views of African jungles, uplands and river courses that have ever been caught by a camera.

The movie's most spectacular moments are provided by a running noose-and-lariat battle between an enraged rhinoceros and members of the expedition mounted in a truck. At one point the rhino gets the upper hand; charging the truck, he topples it over on its side as if it were a baby Austin. Another highlight: a series of submarine close-ups of gigantic hippos lolling on the sandy bottom of a transparent pool. Weirdest animal is the aardvark, which has a squawk like a maddened calliope and the look of a dispirited rabbit sired by an anteater.

Zoologically more fun than a hundred zoos, the film has equally exciting anthropological passages. There are fine shots of African rivermen wrestling with the enormous boiling rapids of the Congo; a brilliant coronation of a Congo king accompanied by fantastic dances and fancy drumwork; and--most curious item of all--the Crusader-like Fulani tribesmen, gorgeously plumed and costumed, and mounted on caparisoned horses like knights in blackface.

Savage Splendor does more than educate and entertain in the tradition of good travelogues. By reason of its lively curiosity, humanity and humor, it also suggests that in an ever-constricting world there is an ever-expanding market for movies which explore with honesty and wit how other, and not necessarily more exotic, people live and act.

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