The New Pictures

Unchained (Hall Bartlett Productions, Inc.; Warner). Other recent prison pictures, notably Walter Wanger's Riot in Cell Block 11, have strikingly anatomized some of the degenerative diseases that afflict the U.S. penal system. Unchained is the first to suggest a practical cure --one that has been tried for more than 13 years, and found hearteningly successful.

Unchained is the story of California's Chino, one of the world's most progressive prisons, and a hypothetical inmate (Elroy Hirsch). Hirsch, a rancher, is sent to jail for beating a hired man he suspected of stealing. In jail he fights with guards, is thrown into solitary confinement. Still savagely resentful, he is transferred to Chino. Warden Kenyon Scudder (Chester Morris) explains the prison's policy of "minimum security": there are no guards, and a prisoner can jump the plain wire fence any time he likes. However, once he leaves, he can never return to Chino.

Chino, as Hirsch soon realizes, is not a bad place to be, all things considered. Prisoners are treated in every possible way like free men. Within limits they choose their own jobs. They sleep in pleasant dormitories and visit with their families every weekend on the prison picnic grounds. They get the best medical care, and psychotherapy if they need it. They are called mister. They go free as soon as a special parole board says they are ready.

Despite all these advantages, Prisoner Hirsch is determined, like many another newcomer to Chino, to escape. The picture tells the story, in a modest and believable way, of how he painfully comes to take his punishment -- and the truth about himself -- like a man.

Unchained is full of good quiet performances. As the hero, Elroy ("Crazy-legs") Hirsch, the professional football player (he played end for the Los Angeles Rams, retired last December) who made good in the movies with Crazylegs, is as sincere as a punch in the nose. And Chester Morris personifies a spirit of mercy tempered with justice.

Battle Cry (Warner) is a hard-breathing WarnerColor effort to cash in on Leon Uris' 1953 bestseller about U.S. Marines in World War II. For two hours and 25 minutes, Director Raoul Walsh relentlessly trails the going-to-war of a baby-faced squad of American stalwarts (Aldo Ray, Tab Hunter et al.), their curiosity doting major (Van Heflin) and the in evitable Old Sarge (James Whitmore). Most of the boys get girls (Nancy Olson, Mona Freeman et al.), and Heflin & Co. finally straggle to glory on Saipan through the Warner Bros, shellbursts.

Hunters of the Deep (Allan Dowling; D.C.A.). Life, on the evidence of the fossils, first ventured out of the sea several hundred million years ago; only within recent history, in the form of man, has life dared to challenge the secrets of its terrible mother. Only within the last decade, with the perfection of the aqua lung, has man moved about his ancient home like the fish he may once have been. The earliest films of life undersea, three of which have been widely released in the last two years, have a certain historic importance. It is impossible to sit through Hunters of the Deep, one of the most beautiful of these films, without being pierced by picture after picture to emotional depths of endless age.

Photographed for the most part among shallow reefs off California and Mexico, and in the Bahamas, Hunters has no story to tell, and makes little effort to zoologize. The camera is content to fish for beauty, and the catch is rich and strange.

P: Sea lions with sad-princess eyes go flitting through the gold and violet depths, as light as swallows in a summer sunset; while under a red reef the huge sea elephants loll and preen themselves like odalisques in a sea god's harem; one of the beauties puckers up to kiss the camera, and the theater rocks as if it had been hit (as in fact it has) by a two-ton buss.

P: Beds of luminous eelgrass blow in the liquid winds like mermaids' hair.

P: A flounder's eyes pop out of its head and seem to walk around, as nervous and irritable as two monkeys on an organ-grinder's string.

P: Mantas in vast flocks flap silently through pale and gloom, a nightmare vision as of witches on their way to the evil sabbath.

The last reel of the film is given to a fine piece of natural comedy. The moviemakers make pets of two giant groupers who lumber about the sea floor after them with the doggy devotion of submarine St. Bernards, begging with soulful looks for a handout. The color throughout is poetic and covers an amazing range. It is a pity that the commentary is bad Swinburne, and the musical score banal, like woozy echoes of Tchaikovsky in a conch.

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