The New Pictures

Go, Man, Go! (Sirod Productions; United Artists) is probably as interesting a movie as can be made about the game of basketball. For one thing, the picture tells the story of what many sportsmen consider the game's greatest team: the Harlem Globetrotters. For another, it is directed by one of Hollywood's most able handlers of men in motion. Photographer James Wong Howe, who shot the magnificent fight sequences in Body and Soul.

A good, fast script by Arnold Becker hits only the biggest bumps on the Globetrotters' road to glory: beginning with the team's hobo start in the late '20s, when a few Negro boys tooled through the Midwest in a fourth-hand Pierce Arrow, playing pickup games, winner take all, in barns and dry swimming pools, and ending when the Trotters won a "World Professional Championship Tournament" at Chicago in 1940.

For story purposes, the hero is Owner-Manager Abe Saperstein (played with plenty of locker-room lip and front-office charm by Dane Clark), the Chicago boy who pushed the Trotters to the top and still keeps them there. For spectator purposes, the real heroes are the famed hams of the hardwood themselves: Marques Haynes, who proves with his incredible dachshund dribble that if the modern basketball giant cannot be passed over he can be passed under, and Goose Tatum, who at one point, standing flat on his feet, wiggles so disconcertingly that an opponent stumbles and almost falls down. Best shot: Haynes, after dribbling right around the entire opposing five while his own teammates doze on the floor, passes to the reclining Tatum, who looks up superciliously from a comic book he is reading, picks the ball out of the air with one hand and flips it into the basket.

For Rob Roy (Disney; RKO Radio), the third chapter in Walt Disney's attempt to write a child's history of England on film, suggests that Producer Disney is at the same time rewriting the old-fashioned Hollywood book on how to make a costume adventure.

The traditional way is to take $5,000,000, reconstruct downtown Bagdad in the outskirts of Las Vegas, hire three leading historians to supply the facts and six writers to grind them to a proper pulp, buy at least four big names for the marquee, get rolling with a colossal publicity campaign, and then hope that people will rush to see the picture before their friends tell them how bad it is.

For Rob Roy, as for the The Story of Robin Hood and The Sword and the Rose, Producer Disney spent no more than $1,500,000. He took a small crew of technicians and not very famed actors to the same ground his story was lived on--in this case the Scottish Highlands. There, among the dingy granges and the ancient trods of the Trossachs country, where the furry cattle stand and stare in the emerald braes as they have for hundreds of years, he set up his cameras. The players appear to feel themselves living again in an age of fable, charm-changed into people far away and long ago. Watching them, an adult audience is soon lost in the misty mood of high romance, and children, for whom the picture is perhaps principally intended, will probably be roaring at the screen like wild little Picts.

Producer Disney was almost as true in story as in style to the old Scots legend. Rob Roy (Richard Todd) is chief of Clan MacGregor, A.D. 1715. He loves a High land lassie, Helen Mary (Glynis Johns), but hesitates to marry her as long as he is fighting the English. Against them he wages a brilliant guerrilla war that finally discredits the British Secretary of State for Scotland, the cruel Duke of Montrose (Michael Gough), and brings a true Scottish patriot, the Duke of Argyll (James Robertson Justice) back to power. In the end, Rob, his bagpiper and his sword-squire strut through London Town to get their pardon of King George I of England.

The principals in Rob Roy, Actor Todd and Actress Johns, are the same Disney used in The Sword and the Rose--Todd was in Robin Hood too--and they play the man and maid with a pleasant innocence and archaic grace. Actors Gough and Justice, also in the previous pictures, are admirable swashbucklers both. The local types are nicely interpolated--a red-cheeked Gaelic extra makes such a vivid vernacular dither with a Highland air that she steals a big scene from the lovers.

What most wins the heart in Rob Roy, more even than the beauty of its backgrounds, is its modesty. The gathering of the clan for Rob Roy's wedding is, for instance, no massive conclave, but a nice little country get-together of 30 or 40 people. The famed battle of Sheriffmuir is not mounted as a mighty spectacle, with thousands of warriors arrayed on either side, but is shown as it must have been fought: with a gaggle of half-armed crofters opposing a fairly small troop of British regulars. Producer Disney seems to have had an idea that other producers might profitably take up: that one good way to recapture the excitement of history--which is exciting essentially because it really happened--is to re-enact the event as much as possible in the way it originally happened.

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