The New Pictures

Full of Life (Columbia) is full of sex. And the sex, for a wonder, has nothing to do with Hollywood's usual sex substitutes--sin on silk, cheesecake photography, the cult of chest. Full of Life is full of a healthy, warmhearted, get-married-and-have-babies kind of sensuality.

From the first spin of the reel, it is plain that the heroine (Judy Holliday) is full of life. As she flap-foots into her average suburban kitchen, her face zombie-like in the spell of some unspeakable urge, it will be obvious to the last row, third balcony, that the lady is pregnant. But what is this dark drive that possesses her? With somnambulistic stare she crosses to the kitchen counter. She reaches for a knife--and then for the bread and peanut butter. She raises the sandwich to her mouth, hesitates. A gleam of madness flickers in her eye. She takes out an onion . . .

As her nesting fever rises, Judy develops some even more outrageous symptoms. One minute she kicks her husband (Richard Conte) out of bed; the next she asks him with a pathetic whine why he always wants to sleep alone. "Look at me," she wails. "I'm a big fat cow." But she is furious when her husband does not contradict her. She is even madder when he chats at the fence with the girl next door. "You're carrying on with that--bffrllggrhaphut!" The next minute, overwhelmed by bacteriophobia, she starts scrubbing the kitchen floor for the fourth time that day. One morning her husband finds her sweeping the back alley. "Oh, Nick," she snivels with self-pity, "it takes so long to have a baby, you forget what made it seem like a good idea in the first place."

Judy's papa-in-law (Salvatore Baccaloni) is a staunch Roman Catholic who considers the child she is carrying to be illegitimate because she and Nick were not married in church. "Whatsamatta?" he bellows. "You don' lika da Pope?" Sure enough, after rollicking through the freshest, funniest, most healthily grown-up comedy that Hollywood has produced in years, Judy finds herself entering a maternity ward in her wedding dress.

The picture, like anything that is really alive, has plenty of faults. It is too long, often disorganized and sentimental. Yet John Fante's script, based on his novel, is full of happy touches, and Richard Quine's direction makes the most of them and of his players' talents as well. In his first Hollywood part, Salvatore Baccaloni, the Met's famed basso buffo, is a macaronical marvel. And Judy Holliday, in her funniest picture, surpasses herself as a comedienne.

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