Two Imports

The Seven Deadly Sins (Franco-London; Arthur Davis) is a French-Italian production which enlists seven sets of prominent actors, directors and writers in an episodic anatomy of sin. It promises a lot, but never quite lives up to the expectations of its theme and interpreters.

Within the rather contrived framework of a sideshow stand, where the customers try to knock down figures of assorted sins, the picture illustrates each transgression in turn. Avarice and Anger are embodied in a vignette about a greedy landlord, his wife and a poor tenant. Sloth tells how St. Peter dispatches a female emissary from heaven to slow down the feverish life on earth. In Lust, an adolescent girl is disillusioned when her mother has an affair with a roving artist. All three episodes are commonplace in writing and direction.

Some of the other sequences are much better. Envy, adapted by Director Roberto Rossellini from a Colette story, is the intriguing yarn of a newlywed wife, who is jealous of her husband's affection for his pet cat. Pride, directed by Claude (Devil in the Flesh) Autant-Lara, is a mordant study of an impoverished, aristocratic mother and daughter (well played by Franchise Rosay and Michele Morgan). The best episode is Gluttony, a Rabelaisian sketch written and directed by Carlo Rim, about a handsome doctor, who seeks shelter during a storm in the home of a peasant. There he is taken with the peasant's tasty cheese as well as with his pretty wife. The ending, in which he chooses between the two, is typically French.

Strange Deception (Excelsa Films; Casino Film Exchange) opens with a striking sequence: a vast, uninterrupted aerial shot as the camera, slowly swooping down for several miles over the bare, cradling hills of Tuscany, finally comes to rest on the figures of two men on a mountaintop.

This camera feat is only one of many extraordinary things about an extraordinary movie. Strange Deception is the first film effort of a highly controversial literary figure: 54-year-old Italian Journalist Curzio (Kaputt, The Skin) Malaparte, notorious in recent times for his shifting and often unsavory political alliances with both Fascist and Communist causes. In Strange Deception, Malaparte, who now claims to have renounced all forms of politics, has made a completely unpolitical movie which he describes as "a Christian film." It is neither pro-nor antiFascist, neither pro-nor antiCommunist; instead, with an almost religious fervor, it voices a profound compassion for the sorrow of man.

Inspired by a news story of an actual incident that took place in a Tuscan village, the picture tells of an Italian soldier (Raf Vallone) who, after ten years of war and Russian captivity, returns to his native village. There he encounters the tragic backwash of war. His younger brother is dead, betrayed as a partisan to the Nazis by a friend. When the soldier announces that he is out to avenge the death of his brother, the villagers, weary of bloodshed, shun him and refuse to identify the betrayer. The soldier's best friend, a pious carpenter (Alain Cuny), falsely confesses to the crime in order to put an end to slaughter. The soldier kills him and, in the act of killing the wrong man, is left impotent for further slaying. In the Christ-like figure of the carpenter who sacrifices himself to save another, Malaparte seems to be embodying his allegorical message of guilt and expiation.

One-man Moviemaker Malaparte, who wrote, directed and composed the music for the film, has clothed his theme in vivid imagery. The picture is one long, visual lament, beginning and ending in the mountains among the crosses of Allied soldiers who died fighting in Italy. The images of death are everywhere: in the head of a butchered calf, in skeletons in glass-walled burial crypts, in the traditional Game of the Cross, with its procession of masked and black-robed figures. Malaparte uses sounds as freshly as sights: dramatically, the funereal, off-screen beating of drums dominates an entire dialogue sequence.

At times the picture becomes overdramatic; at other times its philosophizing gets somewhat diffuse. But in Strange Deception, Malaparte has wrought a powerful, impassioned manhunt that is the product of genuine new screen talent. Undisturbed by some of the criticisms leveled against the picture--the Roman Catholic Church in Italy condemned it, and the Communists distributed handbills attacking it--Malaparte is now going ahead with his next film. It will be a movie version of Robinson Crusoe, which he plans to shoot this fall on the Juan Fernandez Islands, 400 miles off the coast of Chile, the scene of the actual story that inspired Defoe. As with Strange Deception, he sees the theme of his next picture as an expression of "how people . . . can reconstruct, outside of existing institutions and helped only by their own moral instinct and by their own experience of good and bad, their own moral life, to solve the main problems of mankind--those of justice and freedom."

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