The New Pictures

CINEMA

Dunkirk (Ealing; M-G-M). Blimey! 'Ow could 'e do it? 'Ere's this bloke, see, this Mike Balcon--'e ain't no bloody amateur when there's a camera abaht. 'E did aowl' Alec's Lavender Hill Mob, an' with not much 'elp neither, financially so to speak, and they're sayin' 'e's brilliant, 'e's got it made. A ruddy, stained-glass genius, that's what they called 'im. 'E's no genius, 'e's a bloody miracle worker. 'E's taken the evacuation at Dunkirk--their finest hour, like the aowl' boy said, an' the greatest military operation in the 'aowl' bloomin' 'istory of military warfare--an' 'e's got official films and records, pots of money, 'e's got a cast 'e couldn't squeeze into Trafalgar Square, an' wot else's 'e got?

'E's got the worst little stinker of a picture England has sent across the Atlantic in a long time.

It's 1940--with the Majjinot Line crumblin' an' all that. 'Ere's John Mills, 'e's a British corporal an' 'e's tryin' to fight a war in France, an' all 'e's got to shoot at is a bloomin' painted backdrop. 'E heventually walks to the beach, since 'e's walked everywhere else there is, an' 'e lies down for a nap while the Stukas bomb all the other blokes.

But 'e ain't forgotten, not by a long shot. The boat-ownin' toffs of England start thinkin' of 'is well-bein', an' they set off by the thousands to 'elp bring back the lads off the beaches. Sorry day for Blighty, all right. Only one boat makes it across without bein' blown up, and when she gets there, this 'ere corporal and 'is five men 'itch a ride 'ome off 'er without hardly any of the other 100,000 poor bleeders on the beach even stirrin' off their arsenal. War can be 'ell.

Boot Polish (R. D. Purie; Hoffberg),the first Indian-made film to be released generally in the U.S., has drawn quick comparison to Shoeshine, Vittorio De Ska's 1947 Italian classic. The comparison, apparently based on the similarity of titles, is unfortunate. The two films move in opposite directions--Shoeshine despairingly toward the lower depths, Boot Polish wistfully toward the light. More importantly, their coupling might becloud the fact that Boot Polish is a nearly flawless little gem of a fable that glows with its own brilliance, without need of outside illumination.

Director Raj Kapoor's hero and heroine are two orphaned children, living with their sadistic prostitute aunt in the slums of Bombay. At her command, they spend their days in the streets and trams of the city, begging money in a squeaky singsong chant. But an old, kindly bootlegger urges them to the slum child's equivalent of the higher life: "You have been given two hands to work with. Start with small things first, and bigger things later."

The two children hide pennies from their aunt until they have saved enough to buy a pair of brushes and three cans of shoe polish. For a short while they prosper, but with the coming of the rains their customers lose interest in shoeshines. Close to starvation, the boy and his sister are accidentally separated; from there the film wanders to an ending that, for all its melodramatic sentimentality, fits perfectly into the picture's curious blend of gutter reality and fairy-tale dreaminess.

The two children. Rattan Kumar and Baby Naaz, flash from delight to fear to solemn determination with startling virtuosity. From her scrawny, seven-year-old frame, Actress Naaz somehow sums up the whole history of her sex, chattering happily as she works with her brother, huddling against him for warmth, patting his arm in a crisis and reassuring him, "I'll manage it somehow." Raj Kapoor trains his camera on them almost without a break, and they have rewarded him by endowing his film with the gentle luster of a miniature masterpiece.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is the fifth of Tennessee Williams' works to be put on the screen, following The Glass Menagerie, The Rose Tattoo, A Streetcar Named Desire, Baby Doll. In his four earlier films, Williams seemed to need a warmup of two backward steps before he could take one step forward, but at least the movement was visible and real. This time, Adapter-Director Richard Brooks has been able to put very little motion in his motion picture. His Cat is a formaldehyded tabby that sits static while layer after layer of its skin is peeled off, life after life of its nine lives unsentimentally destroyed.

But in Williams, Brooks has a rare playwright who can make his static electric, and a blinkered grope toward the past as suspenseful as a headlong crash into the future. Maggie the Cat (played with surprising sureness by Elizabeth Taylor) is young, beautiful, childless; her hot tin roof is the marital bed no longer shared by her husband Brick (Paul Newman), a onetime college athlete now tying on the booze bag every night in search of the "click in my head." Together they have come back to Big Daddy's "28,000 of the richest acres west of the River Nile," ostensibly for a family celebration of Big Daddy's 65th birthday. But the real cause of the gathering is the news that Big Daddy (Burl Ives) may be dying, and Maggie's real mission is to protect her share of the inheritance from Brick's brother Gooper (Jack Carson), a prolific dullard whose major contribution to the world is five little "neckless monsters."

As the noisy cataract of the birthday party plunges along, the film swirls in tightening circles around each of the characters in turn, eroding the muddy fac,ades they have built up for themselves. Burl Ives, under his robes of benevolent paterfamilias, is superb as a ruthless and contriving tyrant who has lived for 40-odd years with a woman he despises, and raised two sons only to be able to boast of a namesake. Gooper still sweats with jealousy over his brother's schoolboy athletic triumphs, and Maggie yearns pitiably for Brick's love and for the creature comforts she never knew in her youth. Catalyst for them all is Brick, whose homosexual attraction for a teammate (only hinted at in the picture) and subsequent flood of guilt over his buddy's death have led him to give up bed for the bottle. In the end he makes his peace with his father and promises to make true Maggie's lie that she is pregnant. But the outcome is of meager importance. Playwright Williams' stage is filled not with actors in a drama, but with dancers in a psychiatric striptease; when the last veil has been discarded, any further steps are superfluous.

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