The New Pictures

Long John Silver (Treasure Island Pictures; D.C.A.). "Sealed in blood!" croaks Long John Silver to his sidekick, Jim Hawkins, as they skulk in the corner of a dingy pothouse and plot their return to Treasure Island. Old Cap'n Flint, it seems, left many more doubloons in the dunes than he ever told Robert Louis Stevenson about. There are -L-900,000 of them, to be exact, and that explains (though it hardly justifies) all this supererogatory yo-ho-ho on a dead man's chest.

However, Author Stevenson would probably not complain about a sequel, and children under ten, for whom this picture is presumably intended, most assuredly will not.

Made in Australia for a mere $1,000,000, Long John Silver is a pretty crude imitation, as economy cruises are apt to be, of the de luxe $1,650,000 made-in-England original, Walt Disney's Treasure Island (TIME, July 24, 1950). On deck once again is the cutthroat pirate crew, the boy in the apple barrel (Kit Taylor this time), the mutiny, the mad castaway, the attack on the fort--even the same rented parrot, or its Aunt Polly. Luckily, there is also the same actor to play Long John Silver: Robert Newton.

Actor Newton dares to play the lovable old rascal as no one since Wallace Beery would: that is to say, he blatheringly overplays him with the ear-flapping, eye-woggling, nose-swallowing abandon of a man who is trying, with both hands tied behind his back, to get a particularly persistent fly off his face. "Milk!" Newton splutters, staggering back, clutching wildly at his throat and shuddering like the plague. "I be pizened!" The way he walks, anybody would think he had at least twelve peg legs instead of one, and the way he talks, "Jim Oarkins" and "Trays-sher Eye-lund" sound like scrumptiously pleasurable belches.

But the best line of all falls to Pirate No. 2 .(Lloyd Berrell), a Spaniard who twirls his gleaming black mustachios and promises Pirate No. 1: "I weel peel you like a mango!"

Marty (Hecht and Lancaster; United Artists). "Marty," says Mrs. Pilletti to her 34-year-old son, as he moves in on the evening plate of spaghetti after a hard day in Mr. Otari's butcher shop, "why don't you go to the Stardust Ballroom [tonight]?" Marty (Ernest Borgnine) tries to look unconcerned. "Ma, when you gonna give up? You got a bachelor on your hands. I ain't never gonna get married." But his mother (Esther Minciotti) can't let well enough alone, and finally Marty bursts out bitterly, "Whatever it is that women like, I ain't got it . . . I'm a fat little man, a fat ugly man . . . All that ever happened to me . . . was girls made me feel like I was a bug . . . I got feelings . . . I had enough pain. No thanks, Ma . . . You know what I'm gonna get for my trouble? . . . A big night of heartache!"

And yet, even heartache is easier to take than a Saturday night at home in The Bronx. After a while, Marty and his pal Angie (Joe Mantell) ankle over to the Stardust Ballroom to see what's around. "Hey, there's a nice-lookin' short one f'ya," Angie says. Marty asks her for a dance. She says she doesn't feel like it just now, thank you. Marty turns away pale: that's enough of that for one night.

Then all at once something very peculiar happens. A guy comes up to him and wants to know would he like to make five bucks. For what, Marty asks. The guy says, for taking a "dog" home: "I got stuck on a blind date." Marty is horrified. "You just can't walk off on a girl like that!" he gasps. The guy shrugs and pedals off and somebody else gets the fin, but the girl (Betsy Blair) won't have any part of this deal. She goes out on the fire escape and cries. Marty goes out after her and, knowing exactly how she must feel, tries nobly to take the curse off what has happened.

He asks her to dance. "You're not such a dog as you think you are!" he says, trying to sound enthusiastic. They get talking and then they go for a walk. All at once they're both feeling all full of beautiful colors and Marty starts telling her things he never told anybody before --hardly even himself--about the war and the awful time after he came home. He can't stop talking and people are looking at them but neither of them notices until all at once in the craziest place right beside a big empty brick wall with his heart shining out of his face and his eyes filling up he hears himself saying in a shaky voice, "Yuh got a real nice face! Really a nice face!"

Hardly a moment on the screen since Chaplin made the last scene in City

Lights does more deep and tender credit to the human race than this one. Like a penny in the gutter, a heart catches the light. It isn't much, and there are millions like it, but it's coin of the realm, and only a proud child, no matter what his age, will pass it by.

Playwright Paddy Chayefsky scatters such sidewalk epiphanies with a liberal hand through this almost too clever script, which he adapted from his own television play. Many of his coins go down the drain and others are too bright and shiny for belief; but at his best this writer, who was born and raised in a Jewish-Italian part of The Bronx, can find the vernacular truth and beauty in ordinary lives and feelings. And he can say things about his people that he could never get away with if he were not a member of the family.

Wonderful, too, is Chayefsky's sense of the pathos of place--drab little row-frame houses, fluorescent luncheonettes, maverick taxis under the El pillars in the night city. And along with the places, Chayefsky and Director Delbert Mann reproduce precisely the life that goes on in them. The whole truth and nothing but the truth about the unattached male is told in one hurtingly funny shot of the stag line at a public dance hall. And the scenes of porch life and corner lounging ("So whatta we gonna do, huh?") are little epigrams of futility.

The actors, under shrewd direction, prove almost everywhere as good as their material. Joe Mantell is the living image of a lamppost primitive. Betsy Blair is fully convincing as the sort of plain Jane whose homeliness is only skin-deep. Ernest Borgnine as Marty lives up to all the promise he showed as the sadist in From Here to Eternity, and at the same time brilliantly shatters the type-cast he molded for himself in that picture. His Marty is fully what the author intended him to be--a Hamlet of butchers.

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