The New Pictures

tom thumb (George Pal; MGM) is one of the nicest Christmas presents Hollywood ever gave the pigtail-and-popgun set. Producer George Pal has managed to mingle puppets, live actors and animated cartoons with such skill that not once can the spectator see the embarrassing seam where two sorts of cinema meet. As a piece of entertainment, the film is unusually fresh and appealing; it is kid stuff, but it will probably sell a lot of popcorn to the grownups, too.

The script, like the fairy tale, tells a tall story about a short boy (Russ Tamblyn), but in the film the Grimm realities --which were tiresomely unimaginative anyway--have undergone all sorts of pleasant Palliations. There is a marvelously mushy love story, goofed up just enough to give several million adult-dominated wider-twelves a swell chance to hoot and cackle at the well-known foolishness of their self-styled superiors. There is a sackful of the usual peculiar but amusing Pal puppets. There is one of the jolliest holler songs (The Talented Shoes) since Whistle While You Work. There is some smart choreography in the dance of a paper dervish, and one terrific production number in which Actor Tamblyn goes tumbling about Tom Thumb's bedroom--skinning the cat on a baby's crib that is actually 55 ft. long, doing cartwheels on a top hat that is 16 ft. high. There are some fairly funny sight gags, too. When Tom slides down a rope into the royal treasury, the first thing he sees is a potato sack with a gleaming label on it: GOLD. Jaw dropping, he turns to the next sack. The label reads: MORE GOLD. Best of all, there are two of the most ludicrously sinister villains (Terry-Thomas and Peter Sellers) who ever took sneering lessons.

Producer Pal can congratulate himself for having succeeded where Walt Disney often fails: he has managed to play down to his audience and still play up to a standard.

Witches of Salem (Kingsley International) is a foredoomed but fascinating attempt to enlist the powers of darkness on the side of the angels. The film is based on The Crucible, Arthur Miller's angry drama of moral ideas and political implications, which ran for almost six months on Broadway in 1953. Unhappily, Playwright Miller tried to reason his demons out of existence with intellectual argument rather than exorcising them with literary magic and dramatic spells. As a result, a play that held an image for the ages became no more than a vigorous tract for the times.

Exit Miller. Enter Jean-Paul Sartre. In this French film version of the play, for which he wrote a capable and vivid script, Sartre, the famed existentialist and sometime fellow traveler, has somewhat enlarged the political reference in which

Miller's ideas were caught. The camera, moreover, has let some fresh air and country scenery into a drama that often seemed stuffy and stage-bound, and the actors--principally Yves Montand as the hero and Mylene Demongeot as the leading witch--seem to play with more freedom and expressiveness than the original cast did. But Sartre, like Miller, has failed to extricate the essential lesson, the inmost horror of the episode.

As far as the script is concerned, the Puritans had the right idea, but they had it the wrong way round. The Devil was abroad in Salem, all right, but he was not in the witches; he was in the people who burned the witches. A plausible notion--up to a point. But it hardly helps the scriptwriter's case when he identifies the witch burners as colonial capitalists and the hero as a son of the suffering masses, and when he sums the whole story up as no more than an early American instance of class warfare.

Sartre, in effect, has made the same mistake the Puritans did: he has supposed that human life and social history can be satisfactorily explained in terms of dogma eat dogma. And even at the climax, when Sartre and Miller turn to face the problem of conscience at the heart of the play, they take an easy out. The hero is offered the sort of decision that is usually reserved for comic-strip characters: Shall he lie for his life or die for the truth? But what does this schoolboy question have to do with Salem, with the boundless problem of evil in human life, which Salem so powerfully embodies and exemplifies? The authors can properly be accused and proved guilty of special pleading. Life rarely asks such simple questions--or settles for such simple answers.

A Night to Remember (J. Arthur Rank). "God himself could not sink this ship!" So boasted a deck hand aboard R.M.S. Titanic, at that time the biggest vessel (46,328 gross tons) ever built. And so the whole civilized world believed on the night of April 14, 1912, as the Titanic steamed grandly through the mid-Atlantic on her maiden voyage. But God was not mocked. Less than five days after the remark was made, the great sea-wandering city plunged into the depths, carrying with it 1,502 men, women and children, and a kind of easy Victorian optimism that would never rise again.

The event has surely lost much of its importance for people who have been shot full of doubts about progress in two world wars. But it has lost none of the impersonal drama that makes the story of the sinking one of the most effective parables of collective crime and punishment since the Tower of Babel.

According to the film, which follows the version laid down in Walter Lord's bestseller (TIME, Feb. 13, 1956), the crime was scientific superstition, and practically everybody connected with the Titanic was guilty of it. The men who built the ship declared it unsinkable, and apparently, deluded by several generations of awesome technological advance, they so believed. In any case, a ship designed to carry about 3,000 passengers was furnished with lifeboats for only 1,178.

The public was even more credulous. When the captain gave the order to abandon ship, many passengers simply could not believe that the Titanic could possibly sink, and refused to board the lifeboats. And the crew was almost criminally complacent. The Titanic's radioman, for instance, spiked an ice warning, received from another ship, without bothering to send it along to the captain. But then the captain had virtually ignored the five ice warnings he had already received.

In the film, the logic of natural law, specified in The Iceberg, is played against the vanity of human wishes, objectified in the Titanic, to achieve a sense of vast and hideous irony. As sure as man is the master of all things, the ship cannot sink; yet as sure as iron is heavier than water, sink she must. The camera, curious and noncommittal as a passing gull, circles watchfully as the night unfolds its triumphs and hysterics, desperations and epiphanies. In good documentary style, the lines are written to the rhythms of ordinary speech--which seems anything but ordinary on such an occasion. And though the actors, a troupe of 180 British professionals headed by Kenneth More, sometimes fail to seem like ordinary people, their actorish peculiarities are readily submerged in the mass movement. In general, too, Director Roy Baker and Scriptwriter Eric Ambler have skillfully paced and developed the onrush of disaster, and have also managed to involve the spectator's feelings with those of the doomed men and women, and to touch him with the poignant irony of the film's concluding sentence: "Everything that was humanly possible has been done."

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