The New Pictures

Gilbert & Sullivan (London Films, Lopert) is a thoroughgoing stomp through the old Savoy. Though it is well known that one Gilbert & Sullivan opera is more than most companies can produce successfully, the British team of Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat (State Secret) have undertaken to produce almost all of them--and all at once, in this two-hour film--and to tell the life stories of Gilbert & Sullivan at the same time.

Scarcely a petal of each play is preserved--an air of one, a snatch of another --but the writers of the script (Gilliat worked with Leslie Baily, whose Gilbert & Sullivan Book was a 1952 bestseller) have deftly wired them all together to make a charming, if slightly artificial musical forget-me-not. Some of the charm is due to the spirited stuffiness of the Victorian settings and the muted Technicolor. Best of all, several members of the famed D'Oyly Carte company (Martyn Green, Thomas Round, Gron Davies) give silken-fine performances.

As Arthur Sullivan, Maurice Evans does his usual deft job of playing Maurice Evans--a personage hardly sufficient to hold the stage against the powerful presence of Robert Morley. As W. S. Gilbert, Morley fairly strides out of the frame, like an ancestral portrait from Ruddigore.

Despite its good looks and good music, Gilbert and Sullivan never quite comes together as a rounded piece of entertainment. The script so weakens the true story of the great collaborators that it is blown about like a dead leaf in each gust of song. The real human interest lies in the history of Sullivan's attempts to make himself "a Bach, when he was only an

Offenbach," and of his amorous consolations. In ignoring the merry truth about Sullivan (who did nothing worse than lonesomeness will make an emotional bachelor do), the moviemakers were doubtless bent on getting their man past the modern censors. In his own time, Sullivan was approved by a rather stricter custodian of morals: Queen Victoria, who granted him a knighthood.

Murder on Monday (London Films; Mayer-Kingsley), by employing good taste and an intelligent variation on the old amnesia theme, turns out to be one of the season's most sure-handed thrillers.

The basic question is not the trite old "Who Killed Cock Robin?" but the more modern "Am I the Sparrow?" The hero (Ralph Richardson) is a white-collar Briton who comes chirruping home from his desk at the bank one Monday to find that it is not Monday at all--it is Tuesday. Somehow, 24 hours of his life have got lost. To make matters worse, a man was murdered on Richardson's psychological day off and a powder train of explosive evidence leads straight to his door.

Based on R. C. Sherriff's Home at Seven, a hit play of the 1950 London season, Anatole de Grunwald's screenplay inherits some theatrical virtues. Its scenes are clearly built, its parts consistently written. The story itself moves at about the speed of Fate with a hotfoot. The speed, along with some lively shifts of camera angle, almost prevents a moviegoer from realizing that the camera, poor dog, is not really bounding free through the narrative growth, but poodling along on a choke leash of stagy words.

As the leading man, Ralph Richardson seems sometimes to be trying to convey so many subtle expressions at once that the audience gets only a physiognomic blur. In general, though, he comes through clearly and often very delicately as a man whose sturdily conventional head has been subjected to a little more than the traffic will bear.

As director of the film, Richardson does even better work. From Michael Shepley, cast as one of Richardson's friendly neighbors, he has drawn an expert impression of manic, empty geniality. And he wins from Margaret Leighton, as Richardson's wife, a heart-shaking portrayal of what it means to face the curded eye of madness with nothing more than a nice disposition.

The Unicorn in the Garden (U.P.A.; Columbia) demonstrates, in just about the best seven minutes now showing on any screen, what happens to a man who doesn't let his sleeping wife lie. but dares to wake her with the information that there is a unicorn in the garden--"eating roses." The old girl just rolls over, fixes him with an eye like the hubcap of purgatory, and explains: "The unicorn is a mythical beast." The man goes droopingly downstairs and feeds the unicorn a lily. "The unicorn," he hastens to tell his wife, "ate a lily." "You," she concludes, "are a booby, and I am going to have you put in the booby hatch." However, as the moral of the story says, "Don't count your boobies before they are hatched."

Remembering the point, readers who have long treasured James Thurber's cold little classic may rest easy about the first attempt to animate on the screen the characters in Thurber's cartoons. The Unicorn in the Garden--directed by Bill Hurtz of Stephen Bosustow's gifted crew at U.P.A., which has in the last two years produced Gerald McBoing-Boing, Mr. Magoo and The Tell Tale Heart-is the subtlest of the lot. The Thurber Male looks just as he always does--browbeaten by the Thurber Female, and the unicorn is so attractive that he will make Thurber fans wish Bosustow & Co. would try The Rabbits Who Caused All the Trouble, The Bear Who Let It Alone and The Fairly Intelligent Fly.

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