The New Pictures

The Proud and Profane (Paramount) is another rematch between those reliable romantic antagonists: the roughneck and the lady. Both are in uniform this time, and their I-hate-you-I-love-you conflict is fought on the beaches and bedrooms of the South Pacific during World War II.

William Holden, wearing a mustache and a scowl, plays a hard-boiled Marine colonel who flourishes a swagger stick, derides the Red Cross for dishing out "sentimental slop" to his boys, eats out a chaplain simply because the troops, attending a prayer meeting called by the reverend, got sprayed by Japanese mortar shells.

Even worse, Holden makes crude physical advances to a sensitive, high-principled Red Cross girl (Deborah Kerr) who will only condescend to talk to him when he promises to tell her about the death of her husband on Guadalcanal.

Deborah not only gets bamboozled; she gets pregnant. When she learns that bad Col. Bill Holden already has a wife, she takes what appears to be The Only Way Out and tries to fling herself from a cliff. Holden saves her, but so clumsily that she is nearly brained in the process. Will she recover? Yes. Will she lose the embarrassing baby? Naturally.

Now remorse moves in. Bill, seeking surcease in battle, gets a decorative head wound and is brought back to Deborah mumbling, "Forgive me." She does.

Based on a novel by Lucy Herndon Crockett and filmed in the Virgin Islands, The Proud and Profane was produced and directed by the talented team of William Perlberg and George Seaton (Miracle on 34th Street, The Country Girl) and has a strong supporting cast headed by talented Thelma Ritter. None of them could save it.

D-Day the Sixth of June (20th Century-Fox), in case anybody has forgotten, was the day Robert Taylor invaded France. Followed by a few hardy Hollywood extras, he went smashing ashore even before H-hour had struck, and broke the first hole in Hitler's Atlantic wall. After that, this picture seems to suggest, all that the other millions of guys had to do was to jump over Taylor's half-dead body and be careful not to fall in the Elbe. Back in London, Soldier Taylor gives a curt goodbye to an English girl (Dana Wynter)--whose heart breaks in a nice, quiet English way, like a crumpet--and ships back to the little woman and the big house in Connecticut, where he clearly intends to trade in that olive drab for a grey flannel suit.

The Proud and the Beautiful* (Kings-ley-lnternational), a French film based on an original treatment by Jean Paul Sartre, is an existentialist soap opera--a sort of Magnificent Obsession with a French accent.

In the Lloyd C. Douglas story the suffering was zoned; it took place only in the very best shruburbs. In the Sartre resartion, Agony Alley is the main drag of an abominably filthy Mexican village. There, stretched flat on the floor boards of a squalid second-class bus, a European traveler (Andre Toffel) is dying of cerebrospinal meningitis. His wife (Michele Morgan) rushes out to look for the local doctor, but all she finds is a wambling wreck (Gerard Philipe) who has not dared to push a pill since his wife died in a childbirth he drunkenly mismanaged.

The doctor is still drunk, and the patient, left to the ministrations of a large and friendly cockroach, dies. Whereupon the wife, moved by one of those curiously perverse impulses that seem to govern the existential existence, develops a letch for the wretch who would not lift a finger to save the man she presumably loved.

All in all, the obsession is something less than magnificent, but somehow Sartre and his collaborators, Director Yves Allegret and Scenarists Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, sound a more vibrant note than Hollywood and Author Douglas did.

Parisian pessimism is absurdly sentimental, but it is seldom as absurd as Holly wood's vacuum-packed optimism.

* Not to be confused with any other picture of almost the same name, e.g., The Proud and the Profane, The Beautiful and Damned, The Bad and the Beautiful, The Pride and the Passion. Latest title-tattle in Hollywood concerns a forthcoming production of The Pride and the Punishment, adapted from the novel by Fedor Austen.

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