The New Pictures

A Farewell to Arms (David O. Selznick; 20th Century-Fox) is the second screen version of Ernest Hemingway's famed story of love and war in Italy, when he and the century were young. The first version (1932) starred Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes. This time Rock Hudson and Jennifer Jones are the lovers--in CinemaScope and De Luxe color--and the whole production is painfully overblown. What Hemingway wrote as an interlude of amorous flutes and distant drums, Producer David 0. Selznick has scored for brass. But what is really wrong with the picture is the Hemingway story, and what is really fascinating in the picture is the problem of how a story that seemed so right in one generation can seem so wrong in the next.

Author Hemingway once described A Farewell to Arms as "my Romeo and Juliet" and the novel does resemble Shakespeare's play in its sentimental confusion of the pathetic with the tragic. Hemingway's Romeo is an American boy who is serving, as Hemingway himself did, in a Red Cross unit attached to the Italian army during World War I. His Juliet is a volunteer nurse in a British field hospital, set up in a small town where the Alps begin to rise toward Austria. They meet, they fall in love, he is sent to the front. A mortar shell catches him in the leg, and he is invalided back to Milan. She is transferred to the same hospital. Days she takes his temperature; nights she makes it soar. When he goes back to his unit, she goes away to have their baby.

Suddenly disaster. The Germans break through at Caporetto, and the Italian army dissolves. In the confusion the hero is arrested as an enemy agent, but he escapes and deserts. He takes his girl to Switzerland, where they are blissfully happy. Then she dies in childbirth.

The heavy fragrance of that well-known man-eating orchid, romanticism, hangs about the story from the start, but in the culminating scenes, translated almost literally from the page to the screen, the odor is cloying. On her deathbed the heroine pleads piteously, "You won't do our things with another girl, will you?" But she hastens to add, in the tone of a flapper who would not be caught dead with a conventional notion about sex, "I want you to have girls, though." He sobs, and she promises, with a ghastly smile, "I'll come and stay with you nights." She dies murmuring Hemingway's definition of death: "It's just a dirty trick."

A light hand might have rescued what is young and touching in such scenes from what is infantile and mawkish, but Producer Selznick (Gone With the Wind) likes to keep production under his thumb. He bears down to good effect in the battle sequences among the umber Dolomites, and he shrewdly distracts his audience, during the dullest stretch of the story, with a ravishing cinemalbum of the blue Italian lakes. Jennifer Jones's heroine appears to be more neurotic than the plot requires, and the final stages of her pregnancy, as the camera just keeps staring at her heavily padded midriff, seem intolerably long. All in all, the Selznick thumb has rubbed the bloom off Hemingway's mood, while the mere facts of the story are taken in deadly Ernest.

The Seven Hills of Rome (Le Cloud; M-G-M), let the music lovers say what they will, is a fine piece of entertainment for people who like to watch Mario Lanza pursue the uneven tenor of his weight. As the man gets fatter, the voice seems to get thinner. This time Tenor Lanza, by dint of strenuous fasting, has wasted himself away to a mere 200 Ibs., and his tone is as plump as a Percheron's rump. As a musician, though, Lanza owes perhaps too much to his early conditioning as a delivery man for a wholesale grocer. No matter how light the aria, he delivers it--grunting and sweating and rolling his eyes --like a crate of olive oil.

Yet as an actor Lanza shows in this picture considerable improvement. He remembers almost all his lines, and he gives some imitations (of Perry Como, Frankie Laine, Dean Martin, Louis Armstrong) that could easily have been worse. He seems to enjoy the jokes they have assigned to him ("You're Italian?" "No. Only on my father's and mother's side"), and he generally plays as though he thought the story--something about an American crooner who gets stranded in Rome--rather interesting. The scenery, as a matter of fact, is fascinating. At one point, while the camera takes a helicopter tour, the moviegoer gets some wonderful views of the hills of Rome; and he also has frequent opportunity to study the impressive topography of Lanza's leading lady, Marisa Allasio.

Gates of Paris (Filmsonor; Lopert). Rene Clair is a moralist who never moralizes. In this picture, for instance, his moral is a weighty one. Evil is not evil, Clair says, if it does good; in real life the absolutes are relative. Yet the point is made lightly, and it hits home with benevolent accuracy.

Evil is represented by a Marseille tough (Henri Vidal) who is dashingly good-looking but sort of dumb. He takes it on the lam to Paris in a stolen car, falls asleep at the wheel, cracks up, and hides out in a shack on the outskirts of Paris. There he is discovered by the neighborhood bum (Pierre Brasseur), a charming, aging lunk who drinks all night, sleeps till noon, lives off his ancient, hardworking mother, and sulks because nobody loves him.

All at once everybody notices an amazing change in the bum's behavior. He gives up drinking, rises betimes, bustles about on mysterious errands. The quartier is delighted. The tavernkeeper's pretty daughter (Dany Carrel) invites the reconstructed wreck to a dance, and he begins to daydream about romance, riches, monograms on his shirts. And what is responsible for the change? A small thing, says Director Clair. The good-for-nothing has discovered that he is good for something--if only to hide a criminal from the police. As he happily explains to his reluctant accomplice (Georges Brassens): "At last I'm useful." Ah yes, Director Clair seems to sigh, the forces of law and order do have such a difficult time--good is almost impossible to stamp out. But then, so is evil, and in the end the moralist acknowledges that, too.

Director Clair. now 59, does not everywhere rise to his subject (taken from a novel by Rene Pallet), and at no point does he approach the artistic altitudes he reached in the '20s. But he works with a degree of taste that few moviemakers can rival, and perhaps as well as any humorist alive he achieves an exquisite thing: he laughs at life but not at people.

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