The New Pictures

The Teahouse of the August Moon

(M-G-M), John Patrick's Broadway play based on Vern Sneider's novel, won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1954. Translated to the screen by Playwright Patrick and Director Daniel Mann, it will probably impress most entertainment shoppers as one of the better comedy buys of the season.

Like the play, the movie makes a pleasant pretense of seeing America--by seeing American military government--as others see it. Along with the banalysis of democrazy, though, the authors have provided one of the most hilarious stripe teases of recent years. The big laugh is on Colonel Wainwright Purdy III (Paul Ford), who goes by the book (though he usually reads it upside down). "They're gonna learn democracy if I've gotta shoot every one of them," the colonel roars at Captain Fisby (Glenn Ford) as he bids the captain Godspeed to the village of Tobiki on Okinawa, where Fisby is assigned as military governor.

According to the book, the captain's first order of business is to deliver an address to the populace, explaining to them what democracy is and that they have it. Fisby explains. Everybody cheers. The captain is delighted--until his interpreter, a picturesque chink in U.S. defenses who is known as Sakini (Marlon Brando), explains that during 800 years of foreign occupation the Okinawans have learned to cheer whoever is in charge, no matter what he says. The captain is badly shaken --and so begins an alarming assault on American theory by Okinawan practice, a shameless corruption of democracy by the rule of the people.

Captain Fisby tries desperately to Get Down to Business, but Sakini keeps slyly bringing him pleasure in the form of the local geisha girl, name of Lotus Blossom (Machiko Kyo). He pleads eloquently for the erection of a pentagon-shaped schoolhouse, but Tobiki has suddenly worked up a democratic impulse to build a teahouse for its geisha girl to work in. In the end, when Colonel Purdy drops in for a surprise inspection, he sees before him a peculiar democratic vista. Captain Fisby, wandering around town in sandals and kimono, is directing the operations of the Tobiki Brewing Co., a cooperative corporation whose product--a local Sneaky Pete distilled from sweet potatoes--has proven sensationally popular with U.S. troops in the Far East, and whose profits have made the villagers wealthy.

In short, the only important difference between the play and the picture is its cast. Paul Ford, as the colonel, is the only carryover, and in closeup he seems even more a master of the cruder kinds of deadpantomime. Glenn Ford is amiable as young Captain Fisby; Machiko Kyo, one of the most gifted of Japanese cinemac tresses, is pleasantly giggly in a part that scarcely taxes her abilities. As Sakini, Marlon Brando seems to proclaim with every gesture that his talent is too big for his coolie britches.

The Magnificent Seven (Toho; Columbia). Arms and the men have seldom been more stirringly sung than in this tale of bold emprise in old Nippon. In his latest film, Akira Kurosawa (Rashomon) has plucked the epic string. And though at times, in the usual Japanese fashion, some dismal flats and rather hysterical sharps can be heard, the lay of this Oriental minstrel has a martial thrum and fervor that should be readily understood even in those parts of the world that do not speak the story's language. Violence, as Kurosawa eloquently speaks it, is a universal language.

The story is set in medieval Japan, when the common people groaned beneath the rule of outlaw and disorder. A village in a valley is its hero and its theme. Loud are the wails of its inhabitants when a farmer who has overheard some bandits plotting on the hill comes down to tell the village that it will be raided as soon as the rice is cut. But one man, Rikichi (Yoshio Tsuchiya), whose wife was carried off in the last raid, does not wail; he resolves to fight. And the wise old man who lives in the mill reveals to the vil lagers a way to fight: hire soldiers to fight for you. But how can poor farmers possibly afford to pay soldiers? Let them be hungry soldiers, the sage explains, and pay them with rice.

It is done. Two weeks later Rikichi returns from the nearest city at the head of an army--of seven samurai. What follows is a sort of military eclogue, wandering and sometimes tedious, as war and country life are apt to be, but flaring up again and again with a wonderfully natural effect of shock and unexpectedness. At the last, victor and vanquished alike, heaving their cutlasses, sink into the muck of the rice fields; and freedom, when it is born, comes staggering up from the mud all men are made of.

The image is shattering in its simple physical force. Again and again, Kurosawa sends a dark thrill through his audience with a touch of sensuous physical reality. A reflection of flames plays upon a young wife's cheek, explaining its softness. An old man speaks, and the spectator can clearly hear the slobber as it slides up and down his throat. Effective as it is, there is nevertheless something tiresome in all this sensuality. In The Magnificent Seven, as in Rashomon, Kurosawa has provided a feast of impressions, but has skimped on some of the more essential vitamins. The characters are clearly written and admirably played, especially the leader of the Samurai (Takashi Shimura). But only rarely does the story seem to drop through the floor of everyday reality into the moral hell that war really is. Unlike some of his Japanese colleagues, Director Kurosawa is not centrally concerned with spiritual statement. He would rather make a social comment, and in The Magnificent Seven he makes a biting one.

Teenage Rebel (20th Century-Fox) is not nearly so bad a movie as the title--with its overtones of juvenile delinquency --makes it seem. Adapted from last season's Broadway near miss, A Roomful of Roses (TIME, Oct. 31, 1955), the movie describes a skirmish in the unending teenagers v. parents' revolution. The rebel, in this case, is the maladjusted daughter of divorced parents. At 15, the youngster visits her remarried mother (Ginger Rogers) for the first time in eight years. Her mother and stepfather (Michael Rennie) sympathetically figure that the hostile, resentful girl is merely a little bundle of misery. The boy next door is less sympathetic. "Am I losing my charge," he wonders aloud, after she holds him at arm's length, "to be turned down by a creep?" In the language of her contemporaries, she is a square who wants to fit into a world that is round. In the end, after her mother and the boy next door smooth off some of the rough edges, she does. Betty Lou Keim, as the girl, is too convincing a little stinker to generate much pathos, and Ginger Rogers is too vapid a mother to rouse much sympathy. But the acting is competent, the big scenes affecting. In fact, the whole thing is a lot better than most of the drama the moviegoer could see at home on TV.

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