The New Pictures

Moulin Rouge (Romulus Films; United Artists) is a fictionalized biography of famed French Painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901). The son of a nobleman, Lautrec was crippled in childhood and grew up an ugly, aristocratic dwarf who tried, in cognac and in the brothels and bistros of Paris, to forget the pain in his legs and heart. When he died at 37, after a feverish lifetime that included a sojourn in a madhouse, he left behind him a vivid record of the lower depths of Paris, its harlots and hunted, defeated and disfigured, drawn with artistry, insight and compassion.

Director and Co-Author John (The African Queen) Huston has based his film on Pierre la Mure's bestselling 1950 novel, Moulin Rouge. Like the book, the picture takes some liberties with fact, e.g., by building up a romance between Lautrec and a streetwalker. Unavoidably, the film also softens the more Rabelaisian aspects of Lautrec's life; the fact that he was a star boarder at many of Paris' brothels is barely hinted at. But the picture is nonetheless an exuberant, bizarre, visually striking re-creation of an artist and an era, told, as in Lautrec's own work, without pity or revulsion, vulgarity or pathos.

In a dual role, Jose (Cyrano de Bergerac) Ferrer, 5 ft. 11 in., plays Lautrec's father and, standing on knees in stumpy boots for closeups, 4 ft. 8 in. Artist Lautrec. (A dwarf was used for long shots.) Ferrer's is a startling physical likeness: bloated lips, bulbous nose, bushy beard, pince-nez and bowler. But, although his well-nourished performance touches on Lautrec's wittiness and waspishness, it sometimes seems to miss out on his inner loneliness and agony. The women in Lautrec's life make an exotic gallery: blonde French Dancer Colette Marchand as the rapacious streetwalker who almost drives Lautrec to suicide; Suzanne Flon as the perceptive, understanding model, Myri-ame Hayem; Hollywood's flouncy Zsa Zsa Gabor as man-chasing Singer Jane Avril (in real life, a favorite Lautrec cancan model); Katherine Kath as the tigerish, redheaded dancer Louise Weber.

But the outstanding feature of the film is the exciting atmospheric photography. With LIFE Photographer Eliot Elisofon as special color consultant, Director Huston has dipped imaginatively into the Technicolor palette to capture on film much of the quality of Lautrec's own work. Shot in authentic Parisian settings, the picture features muted blue-green backgrounds splashed with hot pinks, burnt oranges and yellows as Lautrec's lonely little figure hobbles down Montmartre's cobblestone streets, or as the cancan dancers come on in the heat and haze of the Moulin Rouge in a swirl of black silk stockings and white lace petticoats. At its visual best, the picture is a Lautrec painting come to life: it has the nervous, whip-cracking line, the absinthe bite, the very color of corruption of Lautrec's Paris.

Above and Beyond (MGM) dramatizes the atom-bombing of Hiroshima.

The picture's central character is the Army Air Force's Colonel Paul W. Tibbets Jr. (Robert Taylor), who was assigned to spearhead the historic Operation Silverplate. The film shows Colonel Tibbets testing and perfecting the new 6-29 long-range bomber in 1943, assembling and training a group of Air Force experts at Wendover Field in the Utah desert during 1944, piloting the Enola Gay (named after his mother), which dropped the first atom bomb on Japan in August 1945.

When it hews to fact, Above and Beyond has documentary validity. And its final sequence, pieced out with newsreel shots of the Hiroshima bombing, has the impact of epochal drama. But unfortunately, Producers-Directors-Writers Norman Panama and Melvin Frank have combined their awesome A-bomb subject with a grade B Hollywood plot. Marital misunderstandings keep cropping up between Colonel Tibbets and his wife (Eleanor Parker) because of his dedication to his job and the secrecy attached to it.

The picture touches only briefly on the moral aspects of the atom bomb.

Colonel Tibbets remarks once, parenthetically, that although he does not approve of mass atomic destruction, it is necessary to speed the ending of the war. One of the few less somber scenes in the film (and one based on an actual incident) has Mrs. Tibbets-mistaking an atomic scientist at Wendover for a sanitary engineer and having him repair some plumbing.

My Cousin Rachel (20th Century-Fox) is a 19th century whodunit that poses a perplexing riddle: Is the fetching, half-English, half-Italian widow Rachel (Olivia de Havilland) a murderess who killed her former husband? And is she now slowly doing away with her lover (Richard Burton) by slipping laburnum seeds into his tea? Or is Rachel only misunderstood--a gracious, generous "woman of impulse ... of strong feeling" whose husband died of a hereditary brain tumor? This mystery is slickly served up with all the full flavorings of romance, tragedy, revenge, intrigue and suspense. Bells clang in the distance, the surf beats on the misty Cornish coast, shadows loom in moss-covered castles. Most of the characters are moody, tormented people who indulge in such eccentricities as ocean dips in the dead of night, and make such remarks as "I came to be troubled by strange and formless fears." Like Daphne (Rebecca} du Maurier's current novel, on which it is based, the picture provocatively leaves the question of Rachel's innocence or guilt up in the air. But there can be little question about the movie version's box-office outcome. Like the Du Maurier novel, it has all the well-mixed ingredients of a sure bestseller.

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