The New Pictures

The Black Castle (Universal-International) is a forbidding edifice in the Black Forest to which, according to one of its inhabitants, "nothing but evil ever came." This moldering manse is presided over by one-eyed Count von Bruno (Stephen McNally), with a mute Lon Chancy as his doorman and Boris Karloff acting as his house physician. When dashing Sir Richard Burton (Richard Greene) arrives at the black castle, he is i) attacked by a black leopard during a hunting party, 2) almost immersed in an alligator pit, 3) thrown into a subterranean torture chamber, 4) prepared for burial alive. The Black Castle tries hard to chill the moviegoer's spine. Most of the time, however, this boy-meets-ghoul melodrama is only tepid theatrics.

Forbidden Games (Robert Dorfman; Times Film Corp.) is a small French masterpiece that looks at a grownup's world of war through the uncompromising eyes of a child. Five-year-old Paulette (Brigitte Fossey) sees her mother & father machine-gunned to death among the pushbikes of a French refugee column in 1940. Dazed and uncomprehending, she wanders off the highway clutching her dead puppy, and is taken in by a family of French farmers. Here, surrounded by the brutality of war and the brutishness of the peasants, she turns for friendship to the family's eleven-year-old son Michel (Georges Poujouly).

Together, the two children play at the reality they know best: sudden and violent death. Solemnly, at "an old mill presided over by an ancient owl, they build a little cemetery. There they first bury Paulette's puppy, then a chick, a mole, a ladybird, a rat, a lizard and a cockroach (which Michel impales on a pen while imitating the terrifying sound of a German dive bomber). They even steal crosses from a real cemetery for their animal burial ground.

The game finally ends when Paulette is taken away by the authorities. Michel, in a fury at his loss, destroys the little cemetery. Paulette, bereft and alone at a relocation center for war orphans, suddenly hears the name Michel spoken in the crowd, and wanders forlornly among a confusion of people in vain search of the one person she loves.

This ironic and touching war story is told in terms of the backwash of war: only far-off conflagrations are hinted at after the opening sequence. But for all its symbolic overtones, it is no stiff, self-conscious allegory. It has a biting vitality and, at times, a macabre humor. The direction of Rene Clement, who adapted the story from Franc,ois Boyer's 1950 novel Jeux Interdits, is as exact as a machine; it also has a brooding, dreamlike quality. Making their debuts as the two juvenile leads, blonde, fragile Brigitte Fossey and sturdy little Georges Poujouly are small, haunting figures, moving through a strange, sardonic tale of death that cries out at the same time with a fierce love of life.

Eight Iron Men (Stanley Kramer; Columbia) is a war film without Hollywood heroics. It tells the story of a squad of eight battle-weary infantrymen holed up for 17 days in a dreary Italian "shooting gallery" near Cassino, where they engage mostly in griping, bickering and bantering about the war. But when one of the G.I.s is pinned down in a shellhole by enemy fire during a reconnaissance patrol, boredom gives way to an almost mystical feeling of brotherhood. Disobeying orders, the squad goes about rescuing the trapped man (it turns out, ironically, that he had only sprained his ankle and calmly slept through the night), and marches back to the rear with a new-found sense of camaraderie.

Adapted from his 1945 play, A Sound of Hunting, by Harry (A Walk in the Sun) Brown, the picture effectively depicts a war of ruins, rubble and mud-spattered patrols. The eight iron men are less convincing: they are types rather than real soldiers, e.g., the nervous G.I. (Richard Kiley), the philosophical G.I. (Nick Dennis), the amorous G.I. (Bonar Col-leano). But the film transfers the play to the screen with a muscular compactness and economy. Although it is only a minor cinematic skirmish, Eight Iron Men strikes an authentic ring of realism from the monotony of war and the soldiers' code of comradeship.

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