The New Pictures

East of Sumatra (Universal) is a hasty assembly job on the reliable prefab plot about a white man in the jungle with two women. It makes up for its lack of big-name players by superior typecasting, and almost succeeds in hiding the fact that its characters are crude studies in black and white by keeping them almost incessantly black and blue--in Technicolor.

The hero (Jeff Chandler) is the strong, noisy type: all things to all men, but just one thing to women. Off to a jungle island to shovel out some tin, he first digs a blonde (Marilyn Maxwell). The next thing that comes to hand is a native princess (Suzan Ball). Eventually, Jeff gets fed up with his babes in the woods, and goes to bed with a bottle of whisky. "Sleep," he murmurs, "that's the stuff that knits the raveled sleave of care." But one session with Bartlett does not make an egghead, and next day Jeff is right back in the workaday world, braving the poison darts that come whistling through the Temple of the Rain Gods. All in all, the picture goes a long way toward explaining the nervous market in tin.

The Little Fugitive (Joseph Burstyn] attempts to follow a seven-year-old boy, a runaway from home, on a 24-hour splurge at Coney Island. As the young hero, Richie Andrusco, who was discovered by the makers of the film while he was riding on the merry-go-round at Coney Island, undoubtedly has the most heart-stirring child's face to appear on the U.S. screen since Jackie Coogan. Even though this lowbudget, Manhattan-made film never takes full advantage of its wonderful material, The Little Fugitive is one of the funniest pictures ever produced in the U.S. outside of Hollywood.

The setting is Brooklyn, the time late summer. The kids in the street sit watching with dull eyes as the vacation melts away like the ruins of a double ice-cream sundae too big to finish. Lennie, 12, looks disgustedly at his little brother. Their widowed mother has gone away for two days to take care of a sick relative, leaving Lennie in charge of Joey. Pretty soon Lennie and his pals are lost in an ornately gruesome game of getting rid of little brother.

Being practical types, they decide not to bury him under the sidewalk ("Aw--ya gotta kill him first"), but to finesse his extinction. One of the boys gets his father's rifle, lets Joey pull the trigger. Older brother Lennie falls down groaning, with a sinister smear of ketchup spreading on his chest. The others shout, "He's dead! You killed your brother, Joey!" Terrified. Joey runs home. No mother. Desperate, he grabs the $6 she left for them, and, hugging his trusty six-shooter, takes it on a lonesome lam that leads him to the end of the subway line that goes to Coney Island.

Doing Coney Island on six bucks, Joey cossacks around the carousel and lances fiercely at the ring with a pudgy forefinger; he jangles vacant-eyed through a miniature scenic railway, slings a sledge as big as himself, whomps the nickel rockets grimly at the wooden milk bottles till they topple at last, and the victor's laurel--a limp paper lei--descends on his brow, and falls around his neck.

The big moment of the binge comes when Joey walks into a cage, picks up a bat, starts swinging at baseballs spit out at him by a machine. Totally unconscious of the watching camera. Joey lashes out for dear life in a display of innocent animal vitality that creates one of the funniest, most beautiful passages ever to cross a screen.

By late afternoon, a weary little youngster washes down the final hot dog with the last Pepsi-Cola, and hurries off in search of a sign that, as he reassures himself by touching each letter quickly in succession with his forefinger, does indeed spell MEN.

How the little fugitive gets straight with society at last seems a pretty long story (75 minutes), but one that is always clearly and effectively told. In their first film, Writers-Directors-Producers Ray Ashley, Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin have shown a high type of that negative good taste which knows what to exclude. At only one or two points do they slip into intellectualized sentimentality. For the most part, the camera modestly keeps its eye on Joey, and. except for a few embarrassing attempts to set him off in pathetic or tragic frames, looks at him calmly, with restraint and without cuteness. At the 1953 Film Festival in Venice, the picture won the Silver Lion, one of the six top awards.

The Big Heat (Robert Arthur; Columbia), like many another movie thriller, gets off to a fast start and then slows to a walk. An honest cop (Glenn Ford) defies his superiors by poking into the affairs of a big-shot gangster (Alexander Scourby) who seems implicated in a suicide. The bad men retaliate by planting a bomb in Ford's car. but blow up his wife (Jocelyn Brando) by mistake. Aided by Gloria Grahame. a lady of uncertain virtue who has been disfigured by one of the gangsters, Ford quits the police force and begins a one-man vendetta against Scourby that winds up in the usual litter of dead bodies and mass arrests. Since all the other characters are merely carbon copies from previous cops-and-robbers films, Gloria Grahame runs away with the picture by giving some complexity to her role of a female lush on the make for mink coats and high living.

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