The New Pictures

Cry Tough (Canon; United Artists) is a title that means next to nothing in a picture that means nothing at all. With a pretense of social protest, the film tries for realism as it pans in on Spanish Harlem and enters slums where children sleep on pallets and adults line up nine-deep to use the bathroom. But what the cameras actually record is little more than a Puerto Ricochet from the smallest-bore gangster plot in the film maker's gun cabinet.

Miguel Antonio Enrique Francisco Estrada (John Saxon), a first-generation Puerto Rican-New Yorker, is just out of stir and determined to go straight; he is a solid, workmanlike thug, though, and the old gang wants him back. They tempt him with a sex moll (Linda Cristal), "just up from Puerto Rico and full of sugar cane." Will he have one lump or two? He hesitates--then takes the whole bowl.

Soon Miguel is back flicking his switch blade. The way to rise above "little Spain" is crime, after all. He robs and murders, takes over as boss of the gang, and cooks up enough violent trouble to satisfy a theater full of Egyptian Dragons.

Actor Saxon, born in Brooklyn in 1935, is not a convincing Puerto Rican, but if Cry Tough has a redeeming feature, it is his quiet, unmumbling appeal as an upcoming young actor.

Look Back in Anger (Woodfall, Warner), when it opened on the London stage three years ago, became a sort of Uncle Tom's Diggings, fanning a flame and suggesting a name for the new literary group that was soon known as the Angry Young Men. Its hero, Jimmy Porter, bellowed rage at religion, the Sunday Times, and his mother-in-law, a woman, he rasped, who was as "rough as a night in a Bombay brothel."

Playwright John Osborne has formed his own film company to give Jimmy an audience even wider than those who heard him storm through 252 performances in London, another 408 on Broadway. But an audience is not what Jimmy needs--he needs a doctor, for he looks back not so much in anger as in madness.

The surreal ravings still tell a real story --of a young university graduate educated beyond his background through the goodness of the welfare state, frustrated in a nation living in twilight, a second-class citizen in a society where the first-class citizens "spend their time mostly looking forward to the past." He has captured his wife Alison (Mary Ure) from the enemy above. With her and his business partner (excellently played by Gary Raymond), he lives in an attic in a Midlands town so bleak that it seems to smell of soft coal and leftover herring. There, University Man Porter runs a sweets stall in the marketplace, when he is not thundering harangues against Alison and her upper-middle-class family and friends. His wife loves him despite his ambition to "stand up in your tears, splash about in them and sing." But finally she has had enough and goes home to her parents, not telling Jimmy that she is pregnant. Her friend Helena (deftly played by Claire Bloom), a visitor in their garret, remains. Jimmy calls her an "evil-minded little virgin," but she becomes his mistress. In the end, his wife returns; the baby has miscarried and Alison is now broken enough to resume in resignation the aimless life in the attic flat.

The film's overall effect is caricature, and some of the fault is in the acting. Richard Burton turns Jimmy into a seething, snarling Elizabethan villain who seems on the point of forgetting himself and spewing out the speech of Shakespeare's Edmund: "Why bastard? Wherefore base?" The screen adaptation also cuts important bits of the play, e.g., Jimmy's illuminating complaint that "there aren't any good, brave causes left. If the big bang does come, and we all get killed off, it won't be in aid of the old-fashioned grand design. It'll just be for the Brave New nothing-very-much-thank-you."

"Look Back in Anger is the best young play of its decade," wrote London Critic Kenneth Tynan in 1956. Others agreed, perhaps seeing more in what the play called to mind than in what it actually said. On the screen, at least, it suffers from imprecision: as Jimmy's troubles fester, Playwright Osborne never seems to know quite where to probe for the core of the boil, often strikes wildly at life itself, implicitly blaming society and government for failings that could only originate in the soul. Look Back in Anger might have been a sounder achievement if Jimmy were just healthy enough to arouse more fear, less pity.

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