The New Pictures

The Bravados (20th Century-Fox) is a western that attempts to draw a useful moral, but it is just too goldurn slow (98 minutes) on the draw. The hero (Gregory Peck) is a ranchman who hunts down and kills three men for the rape and murder of his wife, only to discover that the men did not commit the crime. To make matters worse, the killings have made him a hero to the whole district.

The paradox of public innocence and private guilt is strongly framed in the ending, and the point of the story

("Vengeance is mine . . . saith the Lord") is almost cruelly pressed home. But most of what leads up to the point seems tedious digression, and Cowboy Peck gives the impression that he felt more comfortable in that grey flannel suit (TIME, April 23, 1956) than in ranch pants.

The Parisienne (Lopert; United Artists) fires off BB again, in far and away the most delightful of the seven Bardot reports that have popped in the U.S. in the past two years. Scriptwriters Annette Wademant and Jean Aurel have turned out an original screenplay with a plot that is no more distinctive than a stick, but they have given it a frothy, spicy, sugar-candy coating.

As always, Brigitte plays a pouty fleshpot yearning for a man (Henri Vidal) who doesn't yearn back. This unlikely situation is sillier than usual because this time, besides her natural endowments, she has wealth and social position as the daughter of the "Prime Minister" of France. But Vidal, dad's Chief of Foreign Affairs, throws gravel in her face as he takes off in his car to meet his latest mistress.

After this unhappy beginning, the scriptwriters quickly get down to the business of kidding the pants off Brigitte. In a hilariously overplayed bit of French farce, Brigitte is found by her father hiding in Vidal's bed, and delightedly accepts his stern order that they marry. Order carried out, her cool cat still yowls on neighboring fences. For revenge, Brigitte leaps out of her dress at a visiting prince (Charles Boyer) and wriggles her way into an invitation to fly down to Nice for the afternoon. A few sinless hours later, of course, she is back nibbling again at a repentant hubby's ear.

Brigitte is still no comedienne. But she does make the most voluptuous straight man in the world, especially when playing with such pros as Boyer and Vidal. The film is not notable for witty lines, but with a glance, a shrug, an understated double take, the two actors have turned the airy little script into one of the most buoyant comedies of the season.

A Time to Love and a Time to Die (Universal-International) is an earnest pussyfooter, a film that timidly asks an important question and then cuts out its own tongue to avoid an answer. Taken from the paperweight novel by Erich Maria Remarque, A Time to Love flirts with a clutch of social issues--man's frequently contradictory loyalties to self, nation and fellow man--without ever coming to grips with any of them.

In his book, Author Remarque swapped the communique quiet of the Western Front for the incessant noise of the Eastern Front in World War II, and Director Douglas Sirk has turned a true camera eye on the bleak grey vista of the once-proud German army in shattered retreat, its beaten soldiers yearning only for a hunk of bread and a hole in which to hide from the Russian artillery. But somebody forgot that there was a war on: the hero (John Gavin), a dutiful Wehrmacht private, gets a three-week furlough back to Germany, and from there on, the movie sputters like a jeep on kerosene.

The private's first doubts about the omnipotence of the fatherland occur when he finds his home in rubble, with no one knowing or caring what has become of his parents. In his search for them, he meets a girl (Lilo Pulver) who mistakenly construes his offer of a package of food as a proposition and gets so vexed that two full days pass before she surrenders her virginity. Then he marries her. But the regime that he and his countrymen have created will not leave him alone. His old professor (played with austere dignity by Author Remarque, in his film debut) lives in terror of the SS; a Jewish friend hides out miserably in a bombed-out cathedral; a Gestapo officer hands him a cigar box containing the ashes of his bride's father. Worst of all, the Allied air forces refuse to let bygones be bygones, systematically pound his pretty city to tatters.

Is this, wonders the private, what he really wanted? Piously, he asks the old professor: "Isn't there a place where taking orders stops and personal responsibility begins, where duty turns into crime and can no longer be excused by blaming the leaders?" Author-Actor Remarque replies vaguely: "Each man has to decide for himself." The private goes back to his outfit--for no other reason than that he is afraid he will be shot if he tries to desert. He gets shot anyway by a Russian guerrilla whom he has just saved from execution. His death only begs the issue. In sentimentalizing the simple German soldier's loving heart and patriotic devotion, the film floats emptily away from its central theme: Isn't there a place where taking orders stops and personal responsibility begins?

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