The New Pictures

Times Gone By (Cines; Italian Film Export) is an Italian-made grab bag of episodes that range all the way from the melodramatic to the slapstick. Based on short stories and a play by late 19th century Italian authors, the picture is held together by a rather flimsy plot device: a bookdealer (Aldo Fabrizi) who skims through tales of the '90s.

The outstanding episodes:

P: A droll, Maupassant-like tale about a young married woman and her lover, who fritter away the few hours they have together in bickering and jealous suspicion.

P: A moving, Proustian story of first love between a nine-year-old boy and girl.

P: A courtroom farce in which a bombastic attorney (played by famed Director Vittorio De Sica) successfully defends a voluptuous murderess (Gina Lollobrigida) by playing on the emotions of a susceptible judge and jury.

Volcano (Panama; United Artists) is an eruptive drama set on Vulcano, one of the small (pop. 450), rugged Aeolian islands west of the toe of Italy. In a melodramatic manner, it tells the highly melodramatic story of a prostitute (Anna Magnani) banished by the Naples police to her native island after an absence of 18 years. There she finds her innocent young sister (Geraldine Brooks) in danger of being seduced by an unscrupulous diver (Rossano Brazzi). In the end, the prostitute kills the diver and dies in a volcanic eruption.

Reminiscent in story and treatment of Stromboli (TIME, Feb. 27, 1950), Volcano is a far better film.* Against the island's rough backdrop, the yarn's primitive passions do not seem particularly excessive or out of place. Director William (Salome) Dieterle has made good use of Vulcano's sun-baked terrain, rocky mountainsides, bleak and barren vistas. Blending a documentary style with the blood & thunder, he has turned out some notable scenes: a raw, vivid tuna-fishing sequence, a scene of island women toiling in the cruel pumice mines, a colorful festival procession on nearby Lipari.

In melodramatic prodigality, Anna Magnani outdoes both story and setting. She acts the unhappy heroine with her whole vivid personality, slouching body, disheveled hair, grieving eyes and caged face. Not even a fumbling job of English-language dubbing can detract from her performance. Whether she is mourning the death of her dog, shouting obscenely at the islanders or tipsily singing a holiday song, she makes most other movie actresses look like pale blossoms indeed.

Tonight at 8:30 (J. Arthur Rank; Continental Distributing Inc.), Noel Coward's 1936 play series, has already yielded two better-grade British movies, Brief Encounter and The Astonished Heart. Now three more of the original nine short plays have been transferred to the screen in a richly Technicolored episodic movie. Directed by Anthony (The Rocking Horse Winner) Pelissier, who was a featured player in the stage version, the picture is sometimes long on talk and short on the high sparkle that Coward and the late Gertrude Lawrence gave it in the theater, but it is a faithful, well cast and generally satisfying movie.

The three playlets, ranging in setting from the British provinces to the French Riviera and in subject from the British lower middle class to the international set, are corrosive social commentaries under a blithe veneer.

The Red Peppers, "an interlude with music," details the interminable bickering of a husband & wife variety team in a British provincial theater. At times it becomes repetitiously strident, but Ted Ray and Kay Walsh play the third-rate vaudevillians in first-rate style.

Ways and Means is a fairly long-winded farce about a couple of carefree, down-at-heel professional guests and an imperturbable burglar on the Coote d'Azur. Nigel Patrick, Valerie Hobson and Jack Warner, in a trio of spry performances, play it to the hilt.

Fumed Oak, billed as "an unpleasant comedy," is the best of the lot. After 17 dreary years of marriage, a respectable suburbanite walks out on his nagging wife, shrewish mother-in-law and doltish daughter. But first, he tells them all off. Betty Ann Davies, Mary Merrall and Dorothy Gordon are suitably unpleasant as the ladies, and Stanley Holloway is just about right as the long-suffering worm who turns.

* Volcano was originally to have been directed by Roberto Rossellini, but after his romance with Ingrid Bergman began, Director Rossellini gave up the project and made Stromboli, starring Actress Bergman. Meanwhile Actress Magnani decided to go ahead with Volcano. Both pictures were shooting simultaneously in 1949 on two neighboring islands.

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