The New Pictures

Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (20th Century-Fox).

Given: a young nun and a young marine marooned together on a South Pacific island. To prove: that the public is willing to watch yet one more theological striptease--the cinemactic kind in which the moviegoer is encouraged to sit for about two hours in the dark with a faintly lewd leer on his face, and yet at the last minute is permitted to walk out of the theater wearing a pious smirk. The problem could hardly have been muffed by the dumbest director, but for some reason it was assigned to one of the brightest boys in Hollywood--John Huston, director of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The African Queen and Beat the Demi. And Huston, as nobody will be surprised to hear, has developed his unsubtly sensational theme into a big, slick composition that might appropriately be described as a rhapsody expressly composed for a thousand cash registers.

To begin with, Huston picked players who were not only presold to the public but pre-studied in their parts as well. Deborah Kerr played a nun in Black Narcissus ; Robert Mitchum has done no fewer than four tours of duty as a cinema serviceman. Under Huston's sharp eye, they both give good standard performances. Actress Kerr, whose makeup man went a bit too far with the cloistral pallor, sometimes looks as if she had cut her veins as well as her hair; but Actor Mitchum, even though as usual he does nothing but slob around the screen, has succeeded for once in carrying off his slobbing with significance.

The slobbing starts as Marine Mitchum, smeared with sweat and beard, rolls over the side of a rubber life raft, staggers through the surf to a palm-fringed island and proceeds, with the hearty cooperation of the sound track, to slurp up several gallons of the nearest fresh-water lagoon. The next thing he sees is a nun, and for all the surprise he shows, the audience might think that nuns just sort of naturally came with tropical islands. But Deborah is dramatically startled to see him. "Naow, le's jus' take it easy, ma'am," says Mitchum in that half-asleep Mitchum way. She hastily explains her unchaperoned presence --war, and all that sort of thing. Yawns lackadaisical Castaway Mitchum: "Tha's tough, ma'am."

Anyway, pretty soon they are doing the things movie actors always do on desert islands. Mitchum is snagging coconuts and noosing turtles; Deborah is roasting breadfruit and thatching a sail. Everything is terribly homey--but. "I never thought there were pretty nuns," Mitchum says, all of a sudden. She puts on a prim expression. "Well," says Mitchum defensively, getting his mind back on the track, "I got the corps like you got the church."

Huston soon puts a stop to this sort of fiddle-faddle. All at once enemy troops arrive, and the nun and the marine are forced to take refuge in a tiny cave. To make things more explicit, the nun comes down with a fever, and the marine is forced to undress her and wrap her in warm blankets. Having landed, he now seems to have the situation well in hand.

Will they be able to resist temptation? Will the honor of the corps be upheld? Will the vows of the spirit hold firm against the fevers of the flesh? Will Hollywood knowingly offend millions of Roman Catholic moviegoers and throw $2,500,000 down the drain?

Lizzie (M-G-M). Two souls, as every successful schizophrenic knows, are company; but three souls in one body, as the heroines (Eleanor Parker) of this picture discover themselves to be, are something of a crowd--especially when the girls don't get along. In time they take their problem to a sort of spiritual zoning commissioner, a psychologist (Richard Boone) who prescribes a singular form of group therapy--hypnosis, which proves to be the right treatment for the sick girl but is certainly bad medicine for an audience already drowsy with diagnostic detail.

Elizabeth, the first inmate of the one-woman asylum, is just somebody's steno, plain as a paper clip, holier than thou. She is hysterically blind to the fact that she has a dark other in her life, a hot-panting hellion named Lizzie who writes Elizabeth poison-pen letters as a kind of direct-mail id-vertising. The party of the third part is Beth, "the real fine girl she might have been." Unfortunately, as Actress Parker plays her several parts, it is rather hard to distinguish Elizabeth from Beth. And in the role of Lizzie she seems to confuse the sexual appetite with another kind--eyes bugging and fangs bared, she falls upon her boy friend (Ric Roman) with a ravenous fury reminiscent of the demonic look on Wimpy's face as he tears into a hamburger.

The analysis goes so fast it makes the heroine's heads spin, and almost before the moviegoer knows who's who. he is told what's what: the triple trouble can be traced to an old forgotten rape--one of those things a girl doesn't always notice at the time. Ridiculous? Not in psychiatric terms. For the script, based on a pedestrian thriller. The Bird's Nest, published in 1954 by Shirley (The Lottery) Jackson, is weirdly congruent with a recent case history described by two psychiatrists. Dr. Corbett H. Thigpen and Dr. Hervey M. Cleckley, in The Three Faces of Eve (TIME. Feb. 18). But in terms of entertainment Lizzie will probably be pretty confusing to the old-fashioned kind of moviegoer who thinks that when a girl isn't single, it's because she's married.

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