The New Pictures

Teresa (MGM) is a strange picture, by the usual Hollywood standards. Its hero is an insecure weakling with whom no red-blooded American moviegoer will care to identify himself. Its heavy is that rarely assailed folk heroine, Mom. Its backgrounds (a bombed-out Italian village, a humid Manhattan slum) are as real and painful as a clout on the jaw. Least conventional of all, and the best thing about Teresa, is its heroine, who gives U.S. movies a new kind of personality and performance.

Italy's Pier Angeli, a slender, childlike girl of 18, plays a war bride with no makeup or fancy hairdo, and nothing of what Hollywood knows as sex appeal. Her lean, pretty face radiates something much rarer in Hollywood leading ladies: a lucid innocence through which emotions flow without let or artifice.

Teresa's thoroughgoing naturalism commands respect and, for at least half the picture's length, admiration as well. In its Italian wartime setting, the movie develops a tender, hesitant romance between Teresa and an immature G.I. (Newcomer John Ericson), who has folded up with battle fatigue after his first taste of combat. When he recovers, they marry; until she can join him, he goes home to a tenement flat and his old dependence on his mother (well played by Patricia Collinge).

As a husband, young Ericson cannot face responsibility any more than he could as a soldier. Teresa arrives hopefully, finds herself cooped up in squalor with a bitter mother-in-law, and tied to a boy who, unable to keep a job or strike out on his own, is soon reduced again to psychoneurotic panic.

The direction of Fred Zinneman comes up to his high mark in The Search and The Men. He neither patronizes his Italian civilians, typecasts his G.I.s nor falsifies his combat scenes, which prove as taut as any fiction footage yet shot about World War II. But the picture gets into trouble after it gets back to the U.S. The hero's psychological troubles and diagnosis fall as patly into place as in a clinical report. When the script attempts to show him growing up emotionally in time for a hopeful ending, the change is so drastically telescoped and hastily motivated that the movie curls up and dies.

Teresa marks a creditable debut for its producer, Arthur M. Loew, president of Loew's International and son of the founder of Loew's Inc. (which owns M-G-M). For Pier Angeli (real name: Anna Maria Pierangeli), the picture means overnight stardom and a five-year M-G-M contract that will give her a chance to hold on to it.

Daughter of a well-to-do Roman architect and engineer, Pier got her look of lean intensity from a spell of malnutrition late in World War II. Though she was never trained as an actress, her delicate features and impressive sincerity made her the "discovery" of three different moviemakers in search of talent. The most recent, Teresa's Scripter Stewart Stern, came across her in Rome after she had made her first movie (Tomorrow Is Too Late) in Italy. After he met her, Director Zinneman thought "she was one of the few genuine film talents I have ever known."

But the future of Pier's talent depends on just how skillfully it is handled. MGM, now paying her $1,600 a month plus living expenses, well knows that her unspoiled naturalness is precisely what makes her Pier Angeli. Hence the studio's orders against gilding the lily: no eyebrow plucking, no greasepaint lathering for stills, no hair-dyeing or publicity whirls. Pier's next assignment: the part of a painter who regenerates a swindler (Stewart Granger) in The Light Touch, to be filmed in Tunis and Sicily.

Up Front (Universal-International) tries to bring to life Stars and Stripes Cartoonist Bill Mauldin's famed, long-suffering dogfaces, Willie and Joe, who gave World War II G.I.s a tartly humorous reflection of their own hardships, gripes and frustrations.

Though the movie conscientiously records many of the situations and captions of Mauldin's cartoons, it never catches the spirit of the best of his wartime sketches. Mauldin's line drawings were not only picturesque and funny; they also made a biting, authentic commentary on the lot of the miserable, unshaven, mud-caked footslogger. Up Front operates instead at the level of the comic strip, or the familiar Hollywood service comedy.

Taken as no more than that, it is good fun. The picture makes Willie (Tom Ewell) and Joe (David Wayne) a couple of semiliterate country bumpkins wise in the ways of the Army and the war. While fighting the enemy in the Italian campaign, they must also do battle with a smug, freshly arrived captain (Jeffrey Lynn) civilian black-marketeers of all ages, every MP in Naples and, wherever they go, the endless toils of Army red tape. It is buoyed all along by the expertly funny, warmly sympathetic playing of Broadway's Tom (John Loves Mary) Ewell in his best movie role so far.

Flight Plan for Freedom (MARCH OF TIME) is an engrossing documentary scoop: it gives moviegoers their first ride in a U.S. Air Force B-36, and shows just how one of the six-propeller, four-jet giants would carry out an atomic strike if war should come.

In shots of tightly guarded air bases and quotes from top brass, the film shows the Air Force building its strength and keeping on a day-to-day alert to retaliate against attack on the U.S. Then the movie joins 17 officers and men aboard a B-36, stays with them on a 9,000-mile simulated combat flight on a 39-hour route from Texas to Iceland and back. Target: Detroit.

Inside the world's biggest bomber, the camera pokes into the small, pressurized compartments, jammed with equipment, where the crewmen eat hot meals, perform, their demanding jobs, doze off-duty in tiered bunks. To get from one end of the big bomber to the other, the airmen crawl the distance of half a city block, or slide on a dolly through a tunnel in the innards of the plane.

As the bomber approaches the target, it climbs to seven miles and every crew member dons arctic clothing and oxygen masks against the thin, cold air. Below, a radar unit keeps an eye on the plane's approach, checks the accuracy of its simulated bomb drop. Finally, while Detroit slumbers, unaware that it has been "demolished," the crew members relax from a job which--to them--is already routine. Audiences are more likely to find the trip fascinating, reassuring and, in all its implications, more than a little frightening.

Lullaby of Broadway (Warner), a backstage musical in Technicolor, makes certain of a tuneful score by using hit songs of the last 20 years, e.g., Somebody Loves Me, Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone, In a Shanty in Old Shanty Town. Unfortunately, though the setting is supposed to be 1951 Broadway, the staging of the numbers is dated, and the picture's plot antedates the oldest of the songs.

Lullaby is the kind of cinemusical in which the heroine, caught in a romantic misunderstanding, wants to run away from it all in the last reel and is told by a friend: "But what about the show? It opens tonight and they haven't got anybody to replace you." This time Heroine Doris Day's spat with Dancer Gene Nelson results from her friendship with a solicitous beer tycoon (S. Z. Sakall), whose motives as her angel are really angelic.

Playing a fuddy-duddy who fancies his unearned reputation as a rake, Actor Sakall gives the show some amusing moments. Doris Day, unspectacular as a singer, dancer or actress, is winningly eager to please, and Hoofer Nelson's vigorous dancing talent shows through impressively enough to make his fans wish that the movie had given him more imaginative routines and less of an acting chore.

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