The New Pictures

Bonjour Tristesse (Preminger; Columbia). The thoughts of youth, in the case of 18-year-old French Novelist Franchise Sagan, were brief, decadent and commercial. Her first novel (TIME, Feb. 14, 1955) sold more than 600,000 copies in France and more than 1,625,000 in the U.S. At first the critics were amazed at the book's "maturity," but later many decided that the maturity was mostly just adultery. In this picture the adultery has been tastefully toned down. What is left is an old-fashioned story about incest.

The affair between father (David Niven) and daughter (Jean Seberg), which takes place mostly on the French Riviera, is not physical. Incest, as this story sees it, is emotional infantilism--the fear of life, the compulsion to security, the marriage with death. The marriage is consummated, not with a gesture of creation but with an act of destruction. The daughter murders her father's mistress (Deborah Kerr). Technically, the death is either a suicide or an accident, but if the method is euphemistic the meaning is clear. Father and daughter drift off on an aimless round of inconsequential pleasures.

It is a repulsive tale, but somehow repulsively alluring, though not in the same way the book was. Sagan's sensuous sentences suggested the presence of horror by wreathing softly about it; the camera pries into its morbid subject like a coroner. And the meanings that the novelist saw through her looking glass, darkly, Director Otto Preminger sees face to face in staring Mediterranean sunlight. He loses the French style but gains some common substance.

Director Preminger has done well with his actors, too. David Niven is remarkable as the sort of rake that accumulates his life in his face, like a pile of dead leaves. Deborah Kerr provides one transcendent scene in which, as she overhears her man with another woman, her prim, pretty English face breaks up like a cooky in the fingers of a child. And Jean Seberg, rebounding from her disastrous debut as Joan of Arc (TIME, July 1), blooms with just the right suggestion of unhealthy freshness, a cemetery flower.

Most of the picture's defects are inherited from the author--the schoolgirl longueurs on life, the Rimbaudelairean sentimentality about evil, the fashionable despairs with the Paris labels on them. But then the author has provided the vital thing in the picture too: a story that seizes the imagination and insists on being read not only as a story but as a symptom of one of the more exotic diseases of leisure.

Legend of the Lost (Batjac; United Artists) is filled with authentic Technicolor views of Libya, and packed with authentic Hollywood hokum. The movie stars Rossano Brazzi as a no-good do-gooder, Sophia Loren as a bad girl from Timbuktu, and John Wayne as the man who discovers something good about her.

Villain Brazzi is passing through Timbuktu on his way to find a lost city and bring back silver, gold and rubies the size of eggs. "I hate men," Sophia tells him. "If I could only start over." "Sin," Brazzi assures her, "is a wound that can be healed." Sneers Wayne: "If you want to scrub up her soul ... it may take a little time." Off they go into the desert, where they spend less time, digging for treasure than grabbing at Sophia, who has a tantalizing habit of silhouetting her lush curves against the barren sands when she isn't pouring water over her bare flesh.

Will they get the treasure? Will the treasure get them? Will they get each other? Well, after Brazzi fails to get Sophia ("Everybody else--why not me?"'), he tries to get Wayne with a knife. But Sophia finally gets Brazzi with a bullet, and Wayne gets Sophia.

The Safecracker (MGM) is an amusing illustration of how the British, who so thoroughly deplore their black sheep, nevertheless make sensible use of their wool--by pulling it over the eyes of England's enemies. The hero of this picture is an eminent British cracksman (Ray Milland) who, when World War II broke out, found himself already in uniform--one with plenty of stripes on it. But war is a funny thing. The society that had locked the man up for opening one safe was soon offering him his freedom if he would open another. Since the other one happened to be in a German intelligence HQ in Belgium, the better part of the picture is devoted to Commando tactics--a nasty bit of work, but very nicely underplayed by the British cast. Actor Milland is no great shakes, but Director Milland is altogether satisfactory. The huggermugger at the German headquarters comes off particularly well -- flitting shadows in a pretty gloaming, a sudden flash of teeth and knives, the falling of a body, and the shadows move on. And all the while, strain as he may, the watcher cannot hear a sound.

Old Yeller (Buena Vista) is another little nugget mined by Walt Disney, one of Hollywood's most successful prospectors. It comes from Disney's thoroughly proved mother lode: movies for the kids that adults will stay to enjoy themselves. Old Yeller propounds a major tenet of Disney philosophy : a dog should be a dog, and a boy should act like a man.

Set in the pioneer days in Texas, the picture is populated with a few nice people -- including a pretty, lovable frontier mother (Dorothy McGuire), a strong, tender father (Fess Parker), a couple of attractive kids (Tommy Kirk, Kevin Corcoran) -- and with a slew of terribly cute animals, including a horned toad, a snake, a couple of bears, jack rabbits, squirrels, hogs, buzzards, raccoons, horses, cows, frogs, deer, quail, catfish and dogs.

Top dog is Old Yeller himself, a flop-eared hound with soulful eyes, who behaves as if he were trying to persuade Disney to invent a new cartoon character called Supermutt. He stops a bear that is charging the kid brother, rescues the older brother from a pack of wild hogs, saves the mother from being chewed up by a maddened wolf. The action, in short, is exciting for everybody, but all too often the dialogue is only for the very young. Sample: Kid Brother (after the family cow is killed) : "How come you shot old Rose?" Big Brother: "She was sick." Kid Brother: "Well, you were sick, too. How come they didn't shoot you?"

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