The New Pictures

A Certain Smile (20th Century-Fox), like the film version of Franc,oise Sagan's earlier novel, Bonjour Tristesse, puts aside bored yawning, Sagan style, for well-bred panting, Hollywood style. In the book, precociously world-weary Dominique ho-hums her way through a pair of parallel love affairs, finding no lasting happiness or pleasure in either of them--only a wan, temporary escape from ennui. But Hollywood's Dominique (French Actress Christine Carere) is as pert and wholesome as a cheerleader in love with the football captain. So what if she spends a week on the Riviera with her beau's uncle? She really falls in love with him, doesn't she?

Actress Carere is presented as a homebody who yearns to marry a nice young law student (Bradford Dillman). But his mother does not like her, and her mother gets upset at the sight of him. Only solution: pop off to the seaside with his rakish Uncle Luc (Rossano Brazzi). In the book, after Luc's wife (Joan Fontaine) discovers their affair, Dominique goes right on with him. On the screen, endowed with an honestly passionate heart and soul, Dominique can only tearfully apologize and slink back to the youthful boy friend. Franchise Sagan doubtless regards the movie with a certain smile.

The Naked and the Dead (RKO Tele-radio; Warner), to those who never read Norman Mailer's mammoth 1948 war novel, will seem a grim, visually gripping film. It is one of Hollywood's more rugged excursions so far into neorealism. The naughty words "hell" and "damn" are sprinkled like matinee popcorn through the script, and enough torsos are dismembered to satisfy Jack the Ripper. But those who read Author Mailer's bestseller will miss its biting honesty and unrelenting conclusion.

Focal character of The Naked and the Dead is Lieut. Robert Hearn (Cliff Robertson), a wealthy, well-educated ex-playboy who has been taken as an aide by General Cummings (Raymond Massey) during the invasion of a Pacific island. The general coddles Hearn as he would a favorite son--and tries to sting home his belief that power is everything, that the way to achieve power is by instilling fear. "I make [a soldier] more afraid of me than he is of the enemy," he boasts. "It makes him fight a little harder."

Against this swagger-stick arrogance, Hearn can offer only a hesitant humanism, an instinctive revulsion against the general's icy formula. "How do you calculate," Hearn muses, "whether it's better if some of them get killed and the others get home sooner, or whether they all stay here but go to pot wondering if their wives are cheating on them? How do you tot something like that up?" Replies the general: "I don't concern myself with that."

Equally unconcerned is Sergeant Croft (Aldo Ray). Tough as teakwood and cruel as a gibbet, he shoots prisoners to loot them of their gold teeth, crushes a broken-winged bird in his bare hand. He too builds power on tiers of terror, cries drunkenly to his platoon: "The generals take orders just like I do. It's just as much my army as it is theirs."

The two power forces, one twistedly intellectual and one bestial, converge on Hearn. Unable to break Hearn's passive resistance to the power code, the general angrily assigns him to lead Croft's platoon on a suicidal reconnaissance far behind the enemy's lines. Sergeant Croft, who is furiously resentful at having to share command of the platoon, coaxes Hearn into a Japanese trap, where he is wounded. But contrary to the novel, Hearn survives, while Croft recklessly forces the remainder of the platoon to penetrate even deeper into enemy territory and catches a sniper's bullet.

In the scriptwriters' tidy scheme of things, the general gets a comeuppance not to be found in the original Mailer. Even as he insists at GHQ that the only way to secure the island is through a flanking landing, word comes through that the colonel he left in temporary command has opened an all-out frontal attack. "You fool!" cries the general, but the radio crackles out the news that the attack is a success. His egomania is shattered, and Hearn, from his hospital bed, completes the general's destruction: "I never agreed with your point of view before, but I wasn't sure you were wrong. Now I'm sure. Man cannot achieve the authority of God. And no man, whether he's a politician or a general, should try."

As Croft, Actor Ray keeps iron control over his snarling monster, creates a highly persuasive portrait of absolute evil; Raymond Massey shows convincing restraint as the ego-possessed general. But Actor

Robertson plays Hearn with such juiceless weariness that it is hard to care whether he lives or dies. And by painting in their pat, Sunday-school ending, the scriptwriters and Veteran Director Raoul Walsh painted out Mailer's point that fighting a war has no justice or moral pattern.

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