The New Pictures

From the Terrace (20th Century-Fox) allows its hero, Rich Boy Alfred Eaton (Paul Newman), only one wife and one mistress although Novelist John O'Hara let him have two of each. Even so, the film is still too long by half. What seems like an hour at the outset is devoted to establishing the fact that the hero's parents are rich but plenty neurotic. It is a poor parlor psychologist who cannot deduce from this that Alfred, in an effort to outdo his father, will marry money (Joanne Woodward), win a position in a banking firm by saving its owner's grandson from drowning, devote himself single-mindedly to his career while his wife buckets around with the Long Island mental-cruelty set, and finally be saved from dissolution by the love of a good woman (Ina Balin).

Though the film is shapeless and its ending sissified (O'Hara let his hero go to hell, good woman and all), there are a few nice touches. Says a married chick to a dastard who is fumbling with her farthingale: "I think I'll go put on something a little more comfortable, like my husband." And when an overheated party girl who is trying to climb into Newman's cummerbund tells him, "I'm crowding 19," he asks, "Years or guys?" Actress Woodward is sexily soulless as a wife who flies her scarlet letter as if it were a cocktail pennant, and tauntingly calls up her lover while Newman broods (Newman does little but brood in the film, perhaps because of overexposure to Tennessee Williams). The lover is a psychiatrist, incidentally, and therein lies a small triumph; Hollywood, mindful of protests whenever it portrays a red Indian or an Italian gangster, has at last found a villain whom everyone can hate.

Terrace does not really attempt to portray reality. Instead, it captures what someone in Beverly Hills apparently thought someone in Kansas City would imagine to be the behavior of the East Coast's sinful rich. Says Newman to his breathless love: "You're the first person I've asked to go out with me since I've been married."

The Lost World (Irwin Allen; 20th Century-Fox) exhibits Claude Rains in a red fright-wig, and Jill St. John in--just barely--a pair of pink slacks. These wonders notwithstanding, the most intriguing performers, as is only proper in a Good-Lord-Professor-Can-It-Be? film, are several dinosaurs. Their eyes blaze, their mattress-sized tongues flick menacingly, and their lank green hides glisten in squamous grandeur. They thrash about like lovers in a French art film, roar like convention orators and, when they are hungry, give new depth and meaning to scenery chewing. When two of them duel, Fairbanks-fashion, on the edge of a cliff, they very nearly succeed in bringing to life this tired old Sir Arthur Conan Doyle story of scary Jurassic doings way off in the Amazon rain forest. The human supporting cast, which includes Michael Rennie and Fernando Lamas, adds very little. But then, the reptiles get all the good lines.

Elmer Gantry (United Artists) arrived accompanied by cannonades of publicity indicating that this version of Sinclair Lewis' 1927 novel about tent-show Bible belt religion is under concentrated attack from any number of men of the cloth. Not so.

Lewis' Gantry was a seedy, self-promoting Baptist minister who succeeded mainly on gall and sex appeal; sin was his abiding hobby, and he lit hell's fire in an endless succession of women, from choir girls and parish secretaries to a female evangelist. The book was scored and scourged nearly everywhere, inevitably in blue-nosed Boston, even in Manhattan. But that was 1927, when revivalism was a flammable issue. Hollywood's Gantry is Burt Lancaster, whose 64 teeth flash brighter than ever with a sort of brushed-in goodness; the story line only vaguely approximates a single episode in the book--and in 1960 hardly anyone is complaining.

The film introduces Gantry as a 1920s Midwestern appliance salesman with an orange plaid suit and a hip full of whisky. Not an ordained minister this time, he is an ex-divinity student, expelled for seducing a deacon's daughter in church. When he sees Sister Sharon Falconer (Jean Simmons) conducting a small-town revival meeting, he gets the call again. The object of his affections--and now it's true love--is the incarnation of sweetness who collects money in milk pails and even tries to convert a narrow-eyed newsman (Arthur Kennedy).

Joining her troupe, Lancaster supplies the auxiliary razzmatazz to put the show on the big-time road. Roaring and sweating, whopping the Bible, he soon has the sinners clinging to the tent poles and howling like dogs. In contrast with Sister Sharon's earnest rhetoric--"Would St. Paul play the stock market?"--he appears arm in arm with a chimpanzee, says: "Friends, this might be Darwin's uncle, but he certainly ain't yours or mine. God made man in his own image, didn't he? Well, then, according to Darwin, 'God is a gorilla.' "

All of this leads up Jacob's ladder to one of the Midwest's biggest cities, where Sister Sharon builds her Waters of Jordan Tabernacle, a wooden big top sporting a brightly lighted, revolving cross. While the plot explodes with melodrama, Lancaster makes a torchlight raid on one of the brothels, finds a girl who--no, it can't be, yes, it's Lulu, the deacon's daughter (Shirley Jones). The result is a black press for the revivalists, but in the end Lulu goldenheartedly renounces her charges, sending the once-again-faithful flocking to the new tabernacle. And there, along with Sister Sharon, who by now believes that she can perform healing miracles, they are burned up in an accidental fire that assaults the sky with Old Testament rage.

As a commentary on religion, the film is not so irreverent as it is irrelevant. Its redemption is achieved by Director Richard Brooks in the wonderfully gaudy, artfully graphic flavor of the production. The sound track swells with rousing hymns of revival, and the screen is jammed with Midwestern Gothic: stony legions of aging farmers with dried brown faces, their wives beside them, old understuffed pincushions.

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