The New Pictures

Treasure Island (Walt Disney; RKO Radio) is Walt Disney's first movie made with live actors only. For a generation of small fry brought up on comic books, its Technicolor is gaudy enough to bring Robert Louis Stevenson's classic to life. For adults, the film will prompt sentimental memories of their first encounter with cached doubloons and double-crossing buccaneers--and perhaps make them wonder a little that they could ever have taken it so seriously.

The picture was shot in England (so that Producer Disney could use some of his own impounded treasure), but the story still takes place in the never-never land of young boys' heads. It is played so broadly by British actors in stock-company style that even the youngest fan can follow the adventures of the cast's only U.S. actor, Bobby (The Window) Driscoll, as Cabin Boy Jim Hawkins.*

It also offers the fun of watching an eye-rolling, lip-twitching Robert Newton as he wallows outrageously through the role of Long John Silver, one of fiction's most ingratiating scoundrels. Disney apparently liked him well enough to let him steal the whole treasure (as well as the picture), instead of the single sack of coins that Stevenson let him get away with.

The Men (Stanley Kramer; United Artists) ranks with the handful of extraordinary movies that do credit not only to their makers but to Hollywood. In an industry that lives by the box office, the film is remarkable, first of all, for tackling a touchy subject: the salvage of war-wounded paraplegics, men hopelessly paralyzed from the waist down. More remarkable, the subject has been handled with frankness, taste and dramatic skill. The result is realistic, unsentimental and emotionally powerful.

Producer Stanley (Champion, Home of the Brave) Kramer's film is especially notable for avoiding the slick solution and the easy out. It is not a picture in which faith-healers or master surgeons, in the last reel, make cripples walk again. Its basic theme is courage--courage in the face of utter hopelessness. It eloquently shows that cripples cannot get along with the world or themselves--and neither, for that matter, can normal people--unless they face reality and come to terms with it.

Based on research in a California veterans' hospital, Carl Foreman's script follows the daily life of a hospital for paraplegics: the routine, the physical trials, the mental scars. Much of it is bitter, engrossing stuff. Yet, as the paralyzed veterans fling barbed wisecracks at one another and their attendants, or cynically make light of their own condition, some of it is startlingly funny.

The picture focuses sharply on a wise, fanatically conscientious doctor (Everett Sloane) and three patients: a well-educated cynic (Jack Webb), a horseplaying loafer (Richard Erdman) who enjoys his invalidism at Government expense, and a good-natured Mexican-American (Arthur Jurado)* who is trying to win his release so he can get a house for his mother and his six brothers and sisters. But the brunt of the story and its theme is carried by a sullen, embittered patient (Marlon Brando) and the girl (Teresa Wright) who wants to go through with the marriage they planned before the war.

Brando refuses to see her, resents any attempt to help him. He struggles up from complete despair to an awakened will to live, then to physical rehabilitation, hope --and further disillusionment, and finally, after he has grappled with the facts and not been thrown, to his real beginning. It is a growing-up process that the girl, in her different way, must go through too. Their suffering, and the glimpses of the other characters' struggles, make the film a moving salute to the human spirit.

The Men's flaws are such minor ones as Dimitri Tiomkin's musical score, which is so overexcited that it sometimes gets in the way of the action. Director Fred (The Search) Zinneman's sensitive work clearly places him in the first rank of screen directors. The film is full of fine performances, especially by Actors Sloane and Webb and Actress Wright. Broadway's Marlon Brando, in his first movie appearance, does a magnificent job. His halting, mumbled delivery, glowering silences and expert simulation of paraplegia do not suggest acting at all; they look chillingly like the real thing.

Broadway's 26-year-old Marlon Brando spent his first four weeks in Hollywood learning to live in a wheelchair with 31 paraplegics in a veterans' hospital ward. By the time shooting started on The Men, intense, moody Actor Brando knew, as well as any whole man could, how it feels to be paralyzed from the waist down.

Such wholehearted concentration on his craft may partly explain Nebraska-born Brando's rapid rise to stardom. Without much formal education, he left home at 19 to make a name for himself on the stage. He was luckier than most. After a year's study at Manhattan's Dramatic Workshop and in summer stock, he was cast by Rodgers & Hammerstein as the son in their 1944 I Remember Mama. From then on, says Brando, "I never had to look for work."

In quick succession he got fat parts in Maxwell Anderson's short-lived Truckline Cafe, Katharine Cornell's production of Candida and Ben Hecht's A Flag Is Born. In 1947, he found himself an overnight Broadway sensation as the brutish lout of a husband in A Streetcar Named Desire. He is still not certain that he fully "succeeded in some aspects of the part," in spite of the fact that one critic called him "our theater's most memorable young actor at his most memorable."

After seeing his performance in The Men, Hollywood began to believe Brando's extravagant advance publicity. His personal eccentricities, as well as his acting skill, had the film colony agog. He appeared to be the first genuine "character" since Garbo. Dressed in his usual cotton T-shirt and greasy jeans, Brando shunned the big stars and their glittering parties, brushed Hedda Hopper aside with a few vague grunts, spent most of his time roaming the back alleys and bars, sometimes without shoes. The $150 weekly allowance from his father (who invests the rest of Brando's earnings in Nebraska cattle) was always gone in a few days, much of it handed out in fistfuls to friends, shoeshine boys and waitresses.

Brando dodged all of Hollywood's alluring, long-term offers. Beyond signing for $75,000 to do the screen version of Streetcar, he has no definite plans for the future. His one ambition is to "become a good actor." If he could some day wangle his way into London's Old Vic company, he would like that.

* Last played on the screen by Jackie Cooper in 1934. Before that, in half a dozen versions going back as far as 1908, the role was always taken by a girl.

* Jurado is one of the 45 actually paralyzed veterans who act in the film.

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