The New Pictures

South Pacific (Magna Releasing Corp. and 20th Century-Fox), as a Broadway musical, had so much vim and vinegar that it would be almost impossible to make a bad movie out of it--but the moviemakers appear to have tried.

They gave it everything they had, and a lot they did not. They gave it, for a budget, almost $6,000,000, and for a setting the most beautiful Hawaiian island --Kauai, about 100 miles west-northwest of Honolulu. They gave it a topflight director (Joshua Logan) and a glittering cast. They gave it, on the theory that there can never be too much of a good thing, every last alarum and excursion of the play's somewhat too ployful plot, and then proceeded to lard it out with new business, a new song, even a whole new battle sequence, until the final version runs to the seat-flattening length of 2 hr. 51 min.--plus a 15-minute intermission. They gave it the supercolossal screen of the Todd-AO process and twirled the volume knob on the stereophonic sound system until the chandeliers began to rattle. They gave it some of the smoothest Technicolor that has ever creamed a moviegoer's eyeballs; but then, gripped by the fear that all this would be too subtle, they decided to smear "mood" all over the big scenes by shooting them through filters. Result: too often the actors are tinted egg yellow, turtle green-and sometimes phosphorescent fuchsia.

In short, South Pacific is about as tastelessly impressive as a ten-ton marshmallow. Nevertheless, it will probably run almost as long as it did on Broadway (1,925 performances), and it seems sure to make yet another bale of kale for Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. If it does, most of the credit will belong to the memorable score by Rodgers and to the shrewdly sentimental Broadway book by Hammerstein and Logan.

The book, which makes use of characters and situations in James Michener's bestselling Tales of the South Pacific, tells what happens during the early days of the war in the Pacific to some naval officers, men and nurses on a U.S-held island in the New Hebrides. Nurse Nellie Forbush (Mitzi Gaynor) falls in love Some Enchanted Evening with a middle-aged French planter (Rossano Brazzi). Marine Lieut. Joseph Cable (John Kerr) meanwhile engages in some Happy Talk with a native girl named Liat (France Nuyen), who dances around looking Younger Than Springtime on an island called Bali Ha'i. And the sailors, inspired by a Seabee named Luther Billis (Ray Walston), mill around on the beach, shouting that There Is Nothing Like a Dame. But the picture spends most of its time with the nurse, who tells herself that I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair, but then decides that I'm in Love with a Wonderful Guy.

The main parts are reasonably well played and sung. Actress Gaynor, who has a pleasant voice and a pretty figure, may very well satisfy the customers who did not see Mary Martin play the part. Actor Brazzi, whose songs are superbly dubbed by the Metropolitan Opera's Basso Giorgio Tozzi, is suitably virile as her aging lover.

The Long, Hot Summer (20th Century-Fox) bears only a remote resemblance to the William Faulkner tales on which it is based (The Hamlet, Barn Burning). The Hamlet, in which Author Faulkner aired the moral midden of Yoknapatawpha County in an ecstasy of disgust, is particularly strong stuff, and Producer Jerry Wald clearly had to clean up his subject for the screen. In the process, unfortunately, he converted Faulkner's county into a community almost as corny as Al Capp's Dogpatch, and reduced all the poetry of degradation to the customary commercial serving of fresh ham and pot likkah. And he replaced the emotional ingredients of The Hamlet's grand, grotesque romance--half arsenic, half cantharide--with a conventional love story that is at least as sweet as Coca-Cola.

For all that, it is a pretty exciting movie. Faulkner is as hard to kill as a Mississippi water moccasin, and his energy coils and snaps and hisses in the hundred distortions of the story. To begin with, the young man of the "broad, flat face [with] eyes the color of stagnant water" has been transformed by Hollywood into a dreamy-looking cinemactor named Paul Newman--but Newman's performance as Ben Quick, before the script blunts it, is as mean and keen as a cackle-edge scythe. And Eula Varner, she of the "kaleidoscopic convolution of mammalian ellipses," is divided into two slender young beauties named Lee Remick and Joanne Woodward--but Woodward plays her part with a fire and grace not often seen in a movie queen. And old Will Varner, "thin as a fence rail and almost as long," is transmogrified into the Falstaffian figure of Orson Welles --but Welles, in the first role he has done for Hollywood since Moby Dick, demonstrates decisively that if in the meantime he has scarcely improved as an actor, he is in any case a whale of an entertainer, even when he overacts and over-accents his Deep South dialect.

"Ah put down a big footprint," he sneers at his no-'count son (Anthony Franciosa). "Ah said. 'Heah. Step in. Fill it.' But you nevah did ... Go fishin', boy." And at his daughter he roars, "Wheah's mah crop? Whut follahs me?" When her elegant young man dawdles on the way to the altar, Welles tries to hog-tie her up with Ben Quick. "Ah am no tremblin' little rabbit full of smolderin' unsatisfah'd desires," screams Actress Woodward when Quick puts up his proposition. "[Sex] is not enough . . . not nearly enough!" But Quick has an answer for that: "The world belongs to the meat eaters, Miss, and if you've got to take it raw, take it raw."

If the moviemakers had taken this advice, The Long, Hot Summer might easily have been a great picture instead of just a mighty entertaining one.

Merry Andrew (M-G-M). Danny Kaye is like Aladdin's lamp. Only when an audience rubs him the right way can the genie come out. No audience, no magic; and the cold glass eye of the camera is worse than no audience to an exquisite empathist like Kaye. But even in the worst of his pictures--and Merry Andrew is considerably better than that--Comedian Kaye exhibits the common trait of the greatest clowns, who are not funny because of what they do but because of what they are.

Danny plays a master in a British public school who takes a holiday in Sussex to look for a lost Roman bronze. While he is tunneling away beneath an improbable-looking ruin, a traveling circus pitches tent in the vicinity, and where does Danny's tunnel end? Spang in the middle of the lion act. Danny survives the lion's den--only to be consumed with passion for the girl on the flying trapeze (Pier Angeli). But this is madness! He is already engaged to Miss Letitia Fairchild (Patricia Cutts), a powerful young woman who will stand for no nonsense. What can poor Danny do?

This question is intended to engage the actors' efforts and the moviegoer's intelligence for several reels. Fortunately Danny, as always, transcends his material.

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