The New Pictures

Toward the Unknown (Warner), which attempts to tell the story of the Bell X2, the Air Force's experimental rocket plane, will probably get a rocket boost at the box office from recent headlines. In July the X-2 set a speed record (1,900 m.p.h.) for manned aircraft. Last month it set the altitude record: 126,000 ft. above sea level. Then it crashed in the desert.

Bill Holden, starring in his first independent picture, is the rocket jockey; and as if it is not hard enough to fly an airplane at 1,900 m.p.h.. the script makes him fly it with a big load of guilt-edged insecurities riding inside his crash helmet.

Holden is one of those who broke under Chinese Communist brainwashing and signed a germ-warfare confession. Back home, he tries to fly his way back into the heart of the girl (Virginia Leith), the confidence of the Air Force (Brigadier General Lloyd Nolan) and his own self-respect. The picture is sure to be exciting for taxpayers who like to see what they are getting for their money.

Tea and Sympathy (M-G-M), as a play, was basically just a darn good matinee drama, and the tremendous excitement it generated in audiences was mostly Freudulent. The play packed them in on Broadway for more than 20 months, and was sold to Hollywood for $300,000. After that, the movie world wondered: Had M-G-M spent a bad buck? For almost a year the Hollywood censors and the studio bosses hassled over the weighty problems the film posed. Is the U.S. moviegoer old enough to be told that there is such a thing as homosexuality? Is it decent to suggest that there are worse things than adultery? The answer to both questions was a resounding no, and the studio applied the fig leaf to the offending parts. As usual in such cases, the drama has been seriously damaged (Playwright Robert Anderson wrote the script), but the sex is still fully in evidence. Indeed, the censor seems in most instances to have used the fig leaf as his own eye patch.

The picture, for which the three Broadway leads have been retained, follows the play almost scene for scene. Tom Lee (John Kerr), the 17-year-old son of divorced parents, is a student at a New England prep school. On a campus where every red-blooded boy is expected to go out for one team or another, Tom is regarded by his schoolmates as an "off-horse." He doesn't like football or baseball. He is quiet and gentle, reads poetry, listens to classical music. One day two schoolmates see him sitting on the beach with several faculty wives, sewing a but ton on a shirt (in the play he was accused of lying naked on the beach with a school master who was generally suspected of homosexuality). The story goes the rounds, and soon the other fellows are calling him "Sister Boy.'' Tom's father (Edward Andrews), an umbilical undergraduate, who after 25 years is still unable to cut the old school tie. is bitterly disappointed that his boy is not a "regular guy.'' On a visit to school, he urges Tom to get himself a crew cut like the rest of the fellows, forces him to give up the part of Lady Teazle in The School for Scandal. He begs Tom's housemaster (Leif Erikson), a hearty extravert whose biceps are bigger than his hatband, to make a man of the boy. The only person who really knows Tom and likes him. though, is the housemaster's wife (Deborah Kerr. no kin to John). In the end. when Tom has been driven to suicidal desperation by the taunts of his pals and a panic dread that he may really be what they say he is, it is she who restores his soul by giving him her body.

Curtain--in the play. But in the film, of course, the heroine must pay her homage to The Code. She loses her husband and is miserable ever after.

Most of the actors in the film do not deserve the plaudits they won on the stage. Leif Erikson plays the husband as such a dumb galoot that it is impossible to believe that a sensitive girl like Deborah would ever have married him. John Kerr puts remarkably little imagination into the part of the boy; it .often reads much better than he plays. it. Deborah Kerr, on the other hand, is excellent: always in scale, always in key. And Norma Crane does some wonderful flobbing around the screen as the slavey and general grab bag at the local hash house. 1984. (Holiday; Columbia). Things to come, as George Orwell saw them in his clever antitotalitarian tract, written in 1949, have assumed a horrifying political shape by 1984. The State is everything, terror is normalcy, love is a crime. Political shapes, however, are not the kind that lure millions to the movies, even in an election year. What's more, the camera has not yet been invented that can take a picture of an idea, and Orwell's book was a tissue of ideas--even his characters were no more than debaters' points, well made. For these reasons, the producers of this picture decided to play down, as far as possible, the subtle political angles, play up the obvious physiological curves of a handsome blonde actress named Jan Sterling. Result: a serious political satire comes off the screen as a sort of tractor romance in reverse, an anti-Communist soap opera that might more aptly have been titled Life Can Be Ugly. Orwell's book was depressing, partly because it was far too slick, but this film is far more depressing. The people who made it seem to have slipped on Orwell's slickness, and fallen flat on their faces.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.