The New Pictures

Anastasia (20th Century-Fox) is a name, derived from the Greek, that means "of the resurrection." It is also the curiously appropriate name of the youngest daughter of Nicholas II, last of the Czars of Russia. Many romantics fondly believe that Anastasia survived the slaughter of the royal family in a Siberian cellar in 1918, escaped with two members of the firing squad, and is living today, an indigent widow, near Stuttgart, West Germany. On Broadway, Anastasia was a financially successful attempt, made in 1954, to resurrect this legend in the dubious form of a Cinderella story, with undertones of the old amnesia plot. The play has now become a film vehicle for the resurrection of Ingrid Bergman as a major attraction at the box office. Moviegoers are likely to find the charm of these accumulated resurrections more than slightly wormy.

As Anastasia, Actress Bergman is a princess in distress. Nobody believes she is who she says she is, and even she herself, benumbed by the horrors of the revolution and her escape, is inclined to doubt her identity. The doubt is soon complicated by the fact that she is induced to impersonate herself by the wicked General Bounine, a White Russian adventurer who would like to lay hands on the "Czar's fortune" deposited in the Bank of England. The spectator is thus caught in a dramatic paradox (virtue can triumph only if vice does) that keeps his mind engaged long after his emotions have stopped caring what happens to all the impecunious nobility.

The actors, in general, make good use of their melodramatic opportunities. Yul Brynner is gloweringly glamorous as the villain. Helen Hayes is effective as the Empress, but her work, like much about this picture, has been scanted by the inept direction of Anatole Litvak. Director Litvak made his worst mistake in connection with Ingrid Bergman. Her acting is competent, but only now and then toward the end of the picture, almost as if by accident, can the moviegoer see what he probably will want most of all to see on the screen: the fact that, seven years after her abdication as a movie queen, Actress Bergman is still remarkably lovely to look at.

The Sharkfighters (Samuel Goldwyn Jr.; United Artists). "Sharks," says Lieut. Commander Victor Mature with some petulance as this picture begins, "got lousy table manners." It seems that some unmannerly man-eaters dined on the commander's crew when their destroyer sank in the early days of World War II, and now Mature is grimly determined to make every carchariid in creation pay the reckoning. Assigned to accelerate research on shark repellents. Mature moves in on a sluggish school of scientists like a shovelnose on shrimp. Everything from poison to ultrasonics has been tried, but only copper acetate and octopus juice seem to have much effect on the brutes. However, neither of these is strong enough. What to do?

While Commander Mature--for whom it seems to be much easier to catch an octopus than to pronounce it--strains his brains over a problem of chemistry that turns out to be about as difficult as mixing a highball, the moviegoer has plenty of time to enjoy the seascapes off Cuba, where the film was made, and to get monumentally bored by the story. Things pick up toward the end, though, when Actor Mature himself takes to the water to make the final test. For a little while, as the sharks circle closer and closer, there seems to be a very good chance that they will get him.

Woman of Rome (Ponti-DeLaurentiis; D.C.A.). In the novel by Italy's Alberto Moravia, the most important thing about La Romana is that she is a dark beauty who loves men and money. In the movie version, the most important thing about her is that she is played by Gina Lollobrigida. Gina's mother, an impoverished ex-model, leads her daughter into her old profession, hoping that it will lead Gina into an older and more profitable one. Mother proudly proclaims that "there was not a figure like [Gina's] in all Rome." As the movie opens, Gina strips in an artist's studio and poses. It is merely another proof that mother is always right.

Soon men move into Gina's life. The first is a cad; worse, so far as mother is concerned, he is a chauffeur. When Gina learns that he will not marry her because he is already married, what is there for her to do? She is disillusioned, bursting with "physical exuberance," and full of motherly advice that she has a body to sell. She sells it. Comes the dawn, and Gina wants to die. Instead, she keeps going--from one man to another. The principal ones (the time is the mid-'30s) are a fascist police official, who loves her madly, a craven anti-fascist student, whom she loves madly, and a psychopathic brute, who makes love to her madly. All three lovers meet violent deaths, and at movie's end Gina is pregnant (by the student not, as in the novel, by the brute), to face the future alone.

By U.S. standards, Woman of Rome is an unusual movie, but its grey-toned realismo is hardly a match for the novel's. In its transposition to the screen, the story retains its rather sudsy plot but has lost the perceptive insights that stitched the novel into a meaningful tale. In fleeting images, however, the movie does at times catch the heroine's fatalistic amorality, the pathos of her situation, and even the sense that this ignorant girl has capacities of emotion surpassing those of her "respectable" lovers.

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