The New Pictures

The Birds and the Bees (Paramount] abet the growing suspicion that Hollywood is engaged in a Machiavellian plot to destroy television by sabotaging TV's best comics. Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were the victims in last month's Forever Darling. This time, George Gobel walks the plank. Since the essence of Gobel's comedy is intellectual, The Birds and the Bees cunningly makes its jokes as physical as possible: Gobel takes pratfalls on land and sea, at home and abroad. When he isn't getting pie in the face, he is compelled to read limp double-entendres, make love to a girl taller than himself (Mitzi Gaynor) and play straight man to David Niven.

The plot: Simple-Simon Gobel, heir to a frankfurter fortune, is dogged by Fortune Hunters Niven and Gaynor. In mid-picture, Gobel concludes that Mitzi wants his pelf, instead of his self, and renounces her. Producer Paul Jones liked this idea so much that he has it played all over again, but it is not much funnier the second time around. About the only bright note: the catchy title song neatly handled by Gobel and Gaynor.

Tribute to a Bad Man (M-G-M). "A wrangler is a nobody on a horse . . . with bad teeth, broken bones, a double hernia and lice." The self-description sits James Cagney, the bad man of the title, like Cagney sits a horse. The actor is now 52, but what a hoss-bustin', man-killin', skirt-rippin', jug-totin' buckaroo he can still believably pretend to be. He runs horses on his range, hangs rustlers from his trees, and keeps the home fires burning with a plenty hot number (Irene Papas) who smokes wicked little black cigars between the acts. "I want you feisty!" Cagney croaks, and, just to show his appreciation, he cuts down a mile of trees to bring a piano in, so's she can play it like she used to, back in the house she came from.

The piano has its anxious note. Some 50 winters have weathered Cagney hard, and he begins to wonder if his filly won't "stray off" when the "grass . . . gets a little too thin around here." She says she won't, but then they quarrel about the "hangin' fever" that sets in whenever Cagney sees a rustler. The girl runs away with a stable boy (Don Dubbins), but she soon comes back--it's such fun to bang on that piano. "Don't worry," Cagney comforts the boy, "a fellow doesn't die from his first love." And then he leers. "Only from his last."

Seven Wonders of the World (Stanley Warner Corp.), no matter how fine the publicity men sand it, is a travelogue. But the travelogue, as Cinerama presents it, has been firmly erected in recent years as a pillar of the movie community. Since Sept. 30. 1952, two Cinerama productions have grossed about $50 million, even though they have been shown in only 22 theaters. For the third Cinerama release, the producers have not bothered to refine their process much. The moviegoer is really watching three movies at once, and when, as still frequently happens, one half of a cathedral or a Japanese chorus girl, no matter how solid, is parted from the other by a sudden tear in the seam where the images meet, the trick becomes all too crudely apparent.

"Let's put on our seven-league boots!" cries Radio Newscaster Lowell Thomas, a major stockholder of Cinerama Productions Inc. And away the customers go--around the world in exactly 120 minutes, most of them spent in the nose of a converted B-25 bomber. South America? Fly 'em down to Rio for a newsreel shot of carnival time. Japan? Fuji and some geisha girls is what they want to see. ("So long, Yum-Yum!" chortles Lowell. "So long, Pitti-Sing!") On to India for the Taj Mahal, a fast-moving fight between a cobra and a mongoose.

In Africa, elephants; in Arabia, camels; in Greece, the Parthenon; in Italy, the leaning tower of Pisa and a blessing from the Pope. The beaten track has rarely been so beaten. Only one sequence, a flight over the Holy Land, has anything to offer that could not be found in a grade-school geography book. As the plane wings eastward out of Egypt, the passenger looks down upon "the wilderness of Sin," and it is a scene of devastation so appalling that any sane man would as soon walk into a furnace. To see it is to feel the full humanity of the cry that burst from the children of Israel when they saw it ("Would to God we had died . . . in the land of Egypt''), and to feel the metal glare of Sinai's sides is to know the red-hot anvil that the law and the prophets were forged on.

The episode is short, and the tourist is soon getting the same old runaround: from Niagara Falls to the giant redwoods to the Empire State Building, and a little white church in Dutchess County. Such scenes might look just as good on postcards; but then maybe they would not look so good on bent postcards.

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