The New Pictures

Tomorrow Is Too Late (Rizzoli-Amato; Joseph Burstyn) is a delicate story of confused adolescent love and shame. When a couple of starry-eyed students (Pier Angeli and Gino Leurini) are caught in a storm in the woods and spend the night innocently in an abandoned church, a puritanical summer-camp directress brands them moral outcasts. The girl tries to drown herself, but is saved in the nick of time by the boy and two sympathetic teachers (Vittorio De Ska and American Lois Maxwell), who have been fighting for more enlightened sex education for students.

But, unfortunately, the unconventional theme gets only heavily conventional treatment from scriptwriter and director, who often trample the story's tender reeds with Mediterranean melodrama. Compensation for these shortcomings: 1) a long, lingering look at Pier Angeli before Hollywood discovered her--in Tomorrow, her first Italian picture, made in 1949, she plays the tragic teen-ager with a gentle glow and an innocent coquetry that makes her far more alluring than most of Hollywood's veteran vamps; 2) a look at brilliant Director Vittorio (Miracle in Milan) De Sica as an actor. De Sica, 49, an Italian matinee idol before he turned to directing, proves handsome and talented on the screen, but he would have done this picture more good behind the cameras than in front of them.

Outcast of the Islands (London Films; Lopert) lavishes some major moviemaking talent by Carol (The Third Man) Reed on one of Joseph Conrad's minor works. Conrad's second (1896) novel is a study of a white man's disintegration in the Dutch East Indies. It is hothouse drama as luxuriant as its setting.

Conrad's enchanted prisoner of the tropics is Willems (Trevor Howard), a weakling fired from his job in Macassar for stealing, who goes to live at a lonely trading post run by pompous Almayer (Robert Morley) and his wife (Wendy Hiller). Willems falls in love--temporarily but passionately--with Aissa, a sinuous, savage native beauty (played by Kerima, a 22-year-old Arab girl) for whom he sells out the secret of the post's channel shipping route. Also on hand: Captain Tom Lingard (Ralph Richardson), man of the sea and lover of justice, who punishes Willems for his treachery by exiling him upriver with the merciless native girl he no longer loves.

The picture lops off the last fourth of the novel (which piled melodrama on melodrama, with Aissa shooting Willems), and some of Conrad's tropical thunder reaches the screen only as a muted rumble. But by making much of his movie on location in Borneo and Ceylon, Director Reed has captured the rank, overwhelming atmosphere with which the story is saturated: the landscape of brown golds and brilliant emeralds, the oppressiveness of the jungle, the steaming sunshine, the murmuring river, the endless chattering and chanting of the natives.

The superb cast is colored with this fatal splendor, as the drama is played out among a group of characters whose violent passions spend themselves like a quick tropical downpour. Their story surges and eddies through a picture that matches the passion and profusion of Conrad's prose.

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