The New Pictures

Rouge et Noir (Franco London: D.C.A.). Julien Sorel, hero of the famed novel known to English readers as The Red and the Black, has been called the Hamlet of materialism, the prototype of the split personality, the first modern man. Limits of the camera and requirements of commerce have persuaded Director Claude Autant-Lara (Devil in the Flesh, Game of Love) to vulgarize Stendhal's passionate parvenu as a sort of angry young man in grey flannel culottes, and to reduce his finely ironic portrait of a broken culture to an elegant but oppressively romantic valentine. Yet for the moviegoer who has never read the book, or who can forget it for a couple of hours, the picture offers a witty and exciting script by Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, handsome sets, exquisitely tempered Technicolor, and first-rate performances all along the line. For the customers who like their love potions exotic and never mind the heartburn, Rouge et Noir should prove just about as effective as a shot of straight perfume.

In the main, the script follows the novel. The son of a carpenter in a small French town, Julien Sorel (Gerard Philipe) learns his Latin so easily and has such charming manners that the mayor (Jean Martinelli) takes him on as tutor to his sons. Julien is an intense and contradictory young man, at once precociously worldly and romantically naive, conniving and sincere. Boundlessly ambitious, he professes the prevailing faith in monarchy--the year is 1830--but in his secret heart he worships the memory of Napoleon. Every move he makes is minutely calculated, but he-never knows when he will overturn the board in a burst of uncontrollable passion.

He plans to seduce the mayor's wife (Danielle Darrieux), but overnight he falls in love with her. When the husband begins to suspect, Julien arranges his admission to a seminary with the cunning notion of becoming a bishop, but he so violently loathes the priestly life that he can scarcely last the first six months. And then a kindly preceptor (Andre Brunot) packs him off to Paris as secretary to the charming, intelligent, sophisticated Marquis de la Mole (Jean Mercure). "They despise you," his sponsor warns the young man. "It shows in their exaggerated compliments. A fool would be fooled, but a wise man would pretend to be fooled."

Julien pretends so well that the marquis informally adopts him, and the nobleman's proud and beautiful daughter (Antonella Lualdi), despite her dread of being "dishonored" by a man of ignoble birth, invites him to bed. When her father finds out, he is furious, but his daughter forces him to agree to a marriage. And so the arriviste at last arrives--or does he? Stendhal gave his novel a prodigious finish, and Autant-Lara's failure to film it is one of the cinematic year's important lapses of taste.

St. Louis Blues (Paramount) pretends to be a biography of W. C. Handy, the famed Negro songwriter (Memphis Blues, Yellow Dog Blues, St. Louis Blues) who died last month at 84. As a biography, the picture can lay claim to more fiction than fact, but the story of Bluesman Handy's struggle with his pious father, a Methodist minister ("There's only two kinds of horns--Gabriel's and the Devil's"), is affectingly told. As a musical, the picture will scarcely set the Mississippi on fire; though the famous blues are played and sung in showmanly style, it is not the style in which these things were done in those days. The final performance of St. Louis Blues, by Constantin Bakaleinikoff and the Paramount Symphony Orchestra, is enough to produce a cold sweat on the stones of lower Basin Street.

As a piece of entertainment, though, the picture comes off fairly well. It piles a bigger heap of famous names on the billboards--Nat "King" Cole (as Handy), Eartha Kitt, Pearl Bailey, Cab Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald, Mahalia Jackson--than any other picture since The Ten Commandments, and the top four not only perform their specialties expertly and project themselves as warm and winning personalities. They do a darn good job of acting, too.

The Sheepman (MGM) is a western that offers the oats with a grain of salt --a pleasant tidbit for the tired cinemappetite. The hero (Glenn Ford) is a sheepish young feller who thinks he can pull the wool over the eyes of an entire cattle community. Westerns being what they are, he does just that. And the manner in which he does it provides a solid horse laugh at horse opera.

In the early scenes, the script sets up all the principal cowtown cliches, and one by one the hero neatly knocks them over. As he saunters down Main Street, he out-talks the Town Character, outsmarts the Local Merchant, outtrades the Horse Dealer, outfigures the Marshal (Slim Pickens), outfights the Big Bully (Mickey Shaughnessy), outshoots the Dirty Villain (Leslie Nielsen), outflirts the Prettiest Girl in Town (Shirley MacLaine). Having proved his point ("Nobody is goin' to tell me what I can or cain't do"), he sells off his sheep and latches on to the heroine. "From the top of that hill," he tells her, bashful-like, "yew looked just like a man." And she replies, friendly-like: "The question is how do Ah look from the bottom?" She looks fine.

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