The New Pictures

The Admirable Crichton (Columbia) seemed a fine piece of social satire to an age that was concerned with keeping the servants in their place. Much of the humor is inevitably lost on a generation that can't get servants in the first place. But somehow, despite the ravages of time and more than 50 years of amateur performances, this British adaptation of Sir James Barrie's play is well worth watching as a pretty lesson in the minor art of monocle farce.

"Haven't I always treated you as a human being?" splutters Lord Loam (Cecil Parker), the parlor pink. "Most certainly not!" gasps Butler Crichton (Kenneth More), the pantry tyrant. "Your treatment to me has always been as it should be." When Lord Loam insists, Crichton persists: "Any satisfaction I might derive from being equal [to my master] would be ruined by the footman being equal to me."

Having stated his social thesis, Playwright Barrie proceeds with his demonstration. He sets master and servant down on a desert island, and within two years a society without social distinctions has become one in which the class system is firmly established. But natural selection, not the accident of birth, has made the master the man, the man master. As Crichton wins his lord's daughter (Sally Ann Howes), it is plain, Playwright Barrie seems to be saying, that quality is the better part of equality.

Peyton Place (Jerry Wald-20th Century-Fox) cuts some of the sex and violence from Grace Metalious' hugely profitable peeping tome (300,000 hardbound, 3,000,000 paperback copies sold) about low jinks in old New Hampshire. The novel's small-town citizens were guilty of murder, suicide and such richly varied venery as nude swimming, bundling in convertibles, bastard-getting and incestuous rape. The film script tidies up a few of these sensations, softens a calculated abortion to an involuntary miscarriage, and lets a couple of villains become last-reel good guys. But there is still too much meaningless blood and lust in Peyton Place. The film collapses, during one of the least convincing murder trials ever filmed, when it tries to mop up the whole mess by blaming it on the town's callousness and nasty-minded curiosity. Peyton Place is not nasty at all; in glowing CinemaScope, it looks like the exurb where good commuters go when they die.

Nevertheless, the film is superbly convincing in its panoramas and crowd shots and in some fine scenes of young, nonviolent love. For the first time in memory, a New England town is filmed with neither the whales-and-ale quaintness of a picture postcard nor the brooding gloom of an H. P. Lovecraft horror story. Camden, Me. (chosen for the film setting because Gilmanton, N.H., where Novelist Metalious wrote the book, does not look the part) is prim, bleak or beautiful, but never stagy, and the townsfolk extras look and act like people. What is even rarer, so do most of the actors. Dialogue between a couple of beady-eyed spring peepers at a swimming hole: "Nekkid?" "Nekkid!" Arthur Kennedy, as a bestial Yankee shack dweller, is frightening, but a little too garrulous for a New Englander, even a drunken one. Newcomer Hope Lange is finely fraught as his stepdaughter. Lana Turner plays a mother who is a bundle of nerves about bundling.

Cool, blonde, 19-year-old Diane Varsi, starring in her first movie role, does an excellent job with the sulks and enthusiasms of a moody high school girl. When she and Russ Tamblyn, a good teen-ager at 22, shamble through a scene in which each confesses to the ownership of one of those books that come in plain wrappers, the result could be mawkish, instead is both funny and touching.

Raintree County (MGM) begins in tedium and ends, 168 leaden minutes later, in apathy. Montgomery Clift, talking through his nose and expressing sensitivity of soul by seldom looking other cast members in the eye, jitters through the role of John Shawnessy, hero of the late Ross Lockridge Jr.'s bestselling 1948 novel. Represented to be a kind of rustic, 20-year-old Candide of pre-Civil War Indiana, 37-year-old Clift goes lurching through a swamp in search of a magical "rain tree," supposedly planted years before by Johnny Appleseed. Whether the tree bears knowledge, truth or just the makings of hard cider, Clift finds nothing, comes out covered with swamp goo, and perplexes his girl friend (Eva Marie Saint) with his mumblings.

It is not long before Clift takes to the high grass again, but not to look for trees. A deranged Southern belle (played with whoops, whimpers and childbed eye-rolling by Elizabeth Taylor) thereafter convinces him that she is pregnant, and he marries her. Eva Marie looks distressed, but maintains her maiden faith. Sure enough, everything turns out all right: Fort Sumter is shot up, Elizabeth Taylor goes completely insane, Atlanta is burned again (it looked hotter in Gone With the Wind), Clift gets wounded, Lincoln is assassinated, and finally there is a fond fadeout between Clift and Eva Marie.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Paris; Allied Artists) offers a Quasimodo (Anthony Quinn) who is as ugly as an iguana, but as lovable as a kitten and no more frightening. In two earlier filmings of Victor Hugo's romance, Lon Chaney (1923) and Charles Laughton (1939) took care to spook the audience out of its wits before building up sympathy for the. lovesick, crookbacked bell ringer. But the current Technicolor version (with a French supporting cast, dubbed-in English) introduces Notre Dame's resident troll tenderly stroking a pigeon on one of the cathedral's balustrades, and the film plays hearts-and-gargoyles to the end.

Actor Quinn emotes piteously with his left eye (his right one is matted shut by makeup that realistically puffs, thickens and distorts his entire head to a sub-Neanderthal bestiality), and it seems a shocking breach of manners when Esmeralda, Quasimodo's barefooted gypsy love (amiably played by Gina Lollobrigida), recoils at sight of him. Actor Quinn has done too thorough a job of making his monster human.

In fact, although the screen crawls with oily armed torturers, dark-souled theologians, hell's-imp dwarfs and a wicked king, it is not until the final episode that Director Jean Delannoy gets down to the no-nonsense business of filming a horror story. But the last bit is magnificent hokum. Quasimodo has saved Esmeralda from being hanged unjustly, barricaded her in a cathedral tower. There, clinging to the huge bell that has deafened him, he tolls out his love for her, and she smiles timidly in response. But mistaking attackers far below for soldiers, the maddened Quasimodo showers them with a wooden beam and vast blocks of stone. Then, his deformed shoulders bulging with effort, he upsets a great caldron of boiling lead. Gargoyles gush molten metal; the attackers sizzle satisfyingly. When the mess cools, Quinn's hunchback has broken all records for Notre Damage.

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