The New Pictures

Strangers When We Meet (Bryna-Quine; Columbia) discusses adultery, but instead of probing to the heart of the matter, it settles for pure tripe. Its outlook is expressed in the observation: "Anyplace you've got a housewife, you've got a potential mistress. We're slobs in our pajamas--shaving at home--but next door we're heroes."

In the pajamas is Kirk Douglas, and the suburban woman more or less next door is Kim Novak. He meets her in a supermarket, and his love, at first sight, is framed against a pyramid of oranges. She is fresh and not too seedy, but at home no one is squeezing her. She even leaves her blouse open to attract her husband when he returns from work, but the husband's reaction is: "Why don't you get dressed?" Any man who says that to Kim Novak isn't even a slob.

But Kirk Douglas is a slob and an architect at work on a mountaintop house that will one day be occupied by a bachelor novelist (glibly played by Ernie Kovacs) and his mistress of the moment. Douglas has a successful marriage and one little boy, over whose head he is warned by his attractive wife (Barbara Rush) that "martinis don't mix with s-e-x." "What's s-e-x?" inquires the youth. "Is it like Santa Claus?" Daddy, at any rate, is full of the Old Nick. Symbols clank as Douglas and Novak meet at a roadside inn called the Albatross. They drink martinis, and this time, after some moments of hesitation presumably to keep the film's moral tone above C-level, the cocktails mix just fine with sex.

Inevitably, Douglas' wife finds out about his infidelity, and he has to end his affair with Kim. That is all. No one is very much upset, Hollywood's point being, it seems, that if you can't take it with you, you can at least get away with it.

The Story of Ruth (Samuel 6. Engel; 20th Century-Fox) is that rare film, a Bible story done with taste and without lions. It is true that if Writer Norman Corwin has not actually jazzed up the Old Testament's four brief chapters, he has at least given them a recognizable beat--here a child sacrificed to a flame-bellied god, there a few slaves squashed by a toppling idol. But the liberties are taken with considerable skill, and most of them make entertainingly dramatic sense. The Bible says nothing about the origins of the young Moabite widow who tells her mother-in-law Naomi, "Whither thou goest, I will go," and accompanies her to Bethlehem. Consequently, no one can disprove the Scriptures according to Fox, which make her a neophyte priestess of Chemosh, the child-devouring stone divinity. This gives Elana Eden, the dark-eyed Israeli actress who plays Ruth, a chance to show that she is prettily put together, since Hollywood's standard pagan-priestess gown is an off-the-shoulder number. The device also allows Writer Corwin to add a fairly effective sermon on prejudice to the Bible's skeletal story of filial devotion.

Ruth is persuaded to abandon Chemosh-worship by Mahlon, a gentle young Jew from Bethlehem. He is thrown into prison and then mortally wounded while escaping. Ruth marries him as he dies. Damned as an apostate and pursued by Moabite soldiers, she flees with his mother, Naomi (Peggy Wood), to Bethlehem, and there finds herself in danger of being stoned for idolatry. At last tolerance prevails, and eventually she marries a good and godly man named Boaz (Stuart Whitman).

At one or two points the story moves a bit slowly, and a director less restrained than Henry Koster might have tossed in a cavalry charge or a belly dancer to whomp things up a bit. Yet he resists temptation, and except for a few scenes in which priests of Chemosh, played by weight lifters in green lingerie, clomp about to oboe music, the picture is commendably unepic. The actors strike a reasonable compromise between self-conscious reverence and nat ural behavior, and the speeches they are given are free from the archaic flourishes that no one since the time of King James has been able to write with conviction.

The Story of Ruth is simpler than life, but it is also a warm and moving film, several cuts above the religious films that cinema viewers have been accustomed to.

Ice Palace (Warner) is the sort of film that will be described by misogynists as a good women's picture. The tearful vapidity of Edna Ferber's outsize novel about Alaska is faithfully reflected. Troths are plighted ("Would you, could you . . ."), then blighted ("Doesn't my happiness mean anything to you?"). Love goes unrequited; yet, by adroit plotting, there is plenty of childbirth, all of it calamitous. And as the plot perambulates through three generations, the Kleenex-crumpling goes on and on for the better part of three hours.

Essential to this kind of nonsense is the slender, suffering woman (Carolyn Jones) who stands between two strong but wrong-headed men, endures all of fate's buffets, and at the film's end is a nubile 60, no worse for wear except for a touch of zinc oxide at the temples. She is the beloved of Thor Storm (Robert Ryan), an honest Norwegian salmon fisherman, until ruthless Zeb Kennedy (Richard Burton), a drifting Irishman who is Ryan's best friend, purloins her affections. In Malemute anguish, Ryan harnesses his huskies and mushes off into the Arctic where, to assuage his grief, he sires a son by an Eskimo maiden. In the meantime, the caddish Burton has ditched Actress Jones, a mere hotelkeeper's daughter, and married a millionaire's cold-faced daughter (Martha Hyer), who bears him a baby girl.

Any viewer who does not recognize that the sennets and flourishes here mean Montague and Capulet is a dull fellow indeed. Sure enough, while Burton becomes a millionaire cannery owner and his blood enemy Ryan is transformed into a member of the Alaska legislature who crusades for statehood, their children grow up, marry and die violent but poetic deaths during a dogsled race to the obstetrics ward. However, an infant daughter survives the star-crossed union, and in practically no time at all (as Hollywood time flies) she is a grown-up tomato with troubles of her own.

After a couple of hours of this, the audience is ready, even eager, for violins and end music. Instead, it hears the unmistakable throb of disaster's kettledrums.

Actor Ryan's plane has crashed on a glacier. Will Actor Burton rescue his enemy before Warner Bros, runs out of celluloid? A more chilling question, for everyone except possibly the inhabitants of Rhode Island: After Texas (Giant) and Alaska, where will Edna Ferber strike next?

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