The New Pictures

Conspiracy of Hearts (Rank; Paramount), an Easter hare from Britain that should have a grand run on the big U.S. circuits, is one of those mercifully rare, inexcusably entertaining sentimental melodramas that leave the customers wondering whether to scream, sob, sniffle, snicker, groan or have a heart attack. In this case, they will probably do a bit of everything, and wind up blissfully bushed by the mightiest emotional binge of the cinema season.

Robert Presnell's script is a deplorable masterpiece of tears and terrors that in effect resets the Biblical Massacre of the Innocents as a sort of Our Gang Tragedy, and just for good measure throws in what looks like an Alfred Hitchcock ver sion of the Flight into Egypt.

In central Italy during World War II the Germans have set up a concentration camp for Jewish children, most of whose parents have been liquidated, not far from a good-sized convent. Italian partisans promptly dig a tunnel under the fence, and the Italian guards look the other way while the children escape. Nuns meet the children at tunnel's end and hide them in the convent crypt until partisans can pick them up.

All goes well until the easygoing Italian commandant (Ronald Lewis) is replaced by a Wehrmacht colonel (Albert Lieven) who soon begins to suspect that the convent's Christian charity is not necessarily limited to Christians. At the last, the suspense is enough, as the Italians say, to make the Devil sweat holy water.

Credit for much of the excitement belongs to Director Ralph (Doctor in the House) Thomas, who keeps Hearts pounding along at an unholy pace and coaches a magnificent all-in-the-face performance out of Lilli Palmer, who plays the mother superior. But Scenarist Presnell is obviously the man in charge. In 116 minutes of sheer artifice, he never once misses a melodramatic trick.

Time and again Presnell produces a moment of ulcer-perforating tension--deeper and deeper the pitchfork slashes into a load of garbage that conceals the tender bodies of nine children. Yet just as often he relaxes the show with a twinkle of sly ecclesiastical humor--"The soul,'' a middle-aged nun announces as she gazes in seraphic innocence at the motor of a stalled truck, '"is about to depart from the battery.'' Or again, the script jerks the customer out of his socks with a gesture of almost electrocuting theatricality--knocked down by the fist of a Nazi brute, a priest struggles blindly to his feet, then firmly turns the other cheek. And even the most calcified tear duct will surely start to flow when Scenarist Presnell turns on the pathos--"What is your name?" a nun inquires of a tiny refugee who lifts her great dark eyes, surrounded by dark hollows of starvation, and sweetly replies: "Jew Dog."

The Fugitive Kind (Jurrow-Shepherd-Pennebaker; United Artists), which Playwright Tennessee Williams calls an "emotional record of my youth," was written when he was 25 and rewritten some 17 years later as Orpheus Descending (TIME. April 1, 1957). "I felt like my own life was something sick in my stomach." says the hero of the piece, "and I just had to throw it up. So I threw it up." Broadway audiences were not amused, and most moviegoers will probably feel the same way. In a way it's too bad. because somewhere in the mess there is a kind of nauseating beauty to be found.

Made from a script by Playwright Williams and Screen Writer Meade Roberts, The Fugitive Kind has been described as "one of Tennessee's gentler dramas. The heroine is iust normally murdered. The hero is only burned to death. The real theme is serenity through violence." Whatever it is the theme is developed in a lurid reworking of the myth of Orpheus, the artist archetype. Orpheus is imagined as a New Orleans jazzbo (Marlon Brando) who has "been on a party since I was 15." Disgusted, he decides to "split out" for somewhere else and make a sensible life for himself. But he is one of 'the fugitive kind ... the kind that don't belong no place at all."

At a dirty little town in Mississippi he asks for a job at "the mercantile store," and lists his qualifications: "My temperature's always a couple of degrees above normal, like a dog. I can go without sleep for 48 hours . . . And they say a woman can burn a man down, but I can burn a woman down." The storekeeper's wife (Anna Magnani), "a dago bootlegger's daughter" who is sick of her mean, bedrid den husband (Victor Jory). is particularly interested in the final qualification.

She hires him, and they fall in love. But trouble is not long in coming. A dipsonymphomaniac (Joanne Woodward) takes the jazzbo's temperature and comes begging to be burned down. And finally, in a jealous rage, the heroine's husband shoots her dead, while the sheriff and his men hurl the hero into a roaring inferno.

The Orpheus theme in all this is true and moving. But Williams, has dissipated the theme in a maze of side issues, and Director Sidney (Twelve, Angry Men) Lumet has let too many scenes bog down in Brando's synthetic Southern drawl. In general, though, Brando gives an uncannily affecting performance, and what affects the audience is not his acting--he passionately refuses to act--but his own luminous, personal intensity.

Like all of Williams' plays, The Fugitive Kind is aswarm with symptoms and symbols for amateur psychiatrists to figure out and snigger at. The playwright's vision of the free creative spirit, though perhaps derived from Baudelaire's comparison of the poet with an albatross, provides a beautiful speech, and Brando speaks it with great sweetness and expressiveness. "You know," he says, "they's a kind of bird that don't have legs so it can't light on nothing but it has to stay all its life on its wings in the sky? That's true. I seen one once . . . It had a body as tiny as your little finger . . . but its wings spread out this wi-i-i-ide. They was transparent, the color of the sky, and you could see through them . . . But those little birds, they don't have no legs at all, and they live their whole lives on the wing, and they sleep on the wind . . . They just spread their wings and go to sleep on the wind. They sleep on the wind and never light on this earth but one time. When they die."

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