The New Pictures

The Lovemaker (Trans-Lux). Constrained by customs rooted in the Moslem and the medieval, millions of Spanish women sit behind their lattices and, as the Spanish say, "wait for the blue prince." For a pretty girl or a wealthy girl, the wait may not be long. For those who have neither looks nor money, life can be the sort of gradual death this picture painfully and vividly anatomizes.

It is a pretty good picture, all in all, one of the best of the bad lot that has been made in Spain in the last 20 years. The remarkable thing is that it was made at all. In the midst of the shooting schedule, Director Juan Bardem, a 35-year-old Madrileno whose liberal opinions had not endeared him to the secret police of Franco's Spain, was awakened one chill dawn by a knock on the door. After eleven days of questioning in jail and protests by French intellectuals, he was released and allowed to finish the film. The experience, it would seem, did not intimidate him.

The heroine of his picture (Betsy Blair, who also played the plain girl in Marty) is "a real scarecrow," according to the village bucks who drink away the afternoon at the cantina and fool away the night at the burdel. Worse still, she is not even rich. One day, mostly for want of anything better to do. they decide to play a practical joke. One of them is assigned to make love to her, propose to her, and at the very last minute, maybe just before the wedding, tell her it was all a gag.

The situation is timeworn, but Director Bardem manages to make it seem fresh. His scenes of the wooing, though there are too many of them, are often affecting. The man (Jose Suarez) is ardent and ashamed by turns, the girl at first stunned, then slowly filling up with happiness, as a cup fills with clear water. Days she wanders dreaming through the house, spreading out her clothes, lingering at mirrors. Nights, abjectly available, she clings to him like sticking plaster, tells him too much: the agony of waiting, of being 35 without a man.

Not really a bad fellow, he begins to understand what he is doing. Guiltily, he asks to get out of the shabby joke, but his friends will not let him out. "Like kids playing with ants," they push the joke to its logical, dreadful conclusion--a conclusion in which Bardem's heroine becomes a symbol of all the homely, unloved women in the world.

I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (American-International). There's this mad scientist, see. He's a descendant of Baron Frankenstein, the mad scientist who invented Boris Karioff, and naturally he wants to keep up the family tradition. So one day he ups to another scientist and says, sneaky-like: "I plan to assemble a human being." His friend is horrified. "But, Professor Frankenstein, you can't--" Oh yes, he can, and what's more, he plans to make a teen-age monster. After all, I Was a Teenage Werewolf was a howling success at the box office last year. Explains the mad scientist: "Only in youth is there hope."

So the two scientists go down to Professor Frankenstein's secret underground laboratory, where there is an enormous refrigerator in which he keeps a big pile of arms, legs, brains and other spare parts collected from passing teenagers. In less time than it takes an ordinary doctor to take a temperature, they have built themselves a real live teen-age monster (Gary Conway) and fed the leftovers to a crocodile that is kept around as a sort of garbage-disposal unit. No sooner does the monster come out of the anesthetic than Professor Frankenstein, in deadly earnest, commands him: "Speak! You've got a civil tongue in your head. I know you have because I sewed it in myself."

And so on. As a sequel to I Was a Teenage Werewolf, IWATF will probably rank as one of the year's biggest horrors.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.