The New Pictures

Mambo (Ponti De Laurentiis; Paramount) is offered as "the exalting story of a slum girl who attains integrity through her experiences with men and her love of the dance." Still, it might be advisable to have a look at the picture before showing a print to the kiddies. Giovanna (Silvana Mangano) is a Venetian shopgirl. In the daytime she displays her glamorous glass for the customers; at night she is ready for broader interests. But Mario (Vittorio Gassman), her boy friend, is primarily interested in a phony buck, any way he can get it. When Silvana meets a no-count count (Michael Rennie), Vittorio sees his chance to do some three-cushion pimping. In the upshot Silvana gets drunk at a costume ball, has an experience with the count: "It was daybreak before I could leave--humiliated--disgusted ... I didn't know where I could hide--where I could run to." The manager (Shelley Winters) of a mambo troupe (actually Katherine Dunham's) suggests that Silvana go along with them. Says Shelley: "This girl has a very important talent"--for the dance, she means, but she is mistaken. Silvana mambos like a self-conscious tourist. Her real talent is her uncanny beauty, all cool glow and rich simplicity, and a sensational figure. Then, too, it takes no little skill to read with a straight face such lines as those with which this picture concludes: "There was left to me only what I had learned through work, heartache, and a rich but tragic love--that, and my talent as a dancer. Perhaps, in ... the absorbing world of the mambo, I could find forgetfulness . . ."

The Impostor (Shochiku; Brandon Films). Three Japanese films shown in the U.S. since the war--Rashomon, Ugetsu, Gate of Hell--were made, and made superbly, to win world prestige for the Japanese product. The Impostor was made for the folks back home who have a yen for the movies. The difference is startling. The other three often had the exquisiteness of Hokusai prints brought to life. The Impostor, far more popular at the Japanese ) box office, has the look of a grade A Hollywood costume adventure that was shot with an almond-eyed camera. The story opens in a geisha house, where lies "the bored baron" (Utaemon Ichikawa), the D'Artagnan of Japanese fiction, too bored even to bother with the dish that has been laid before him--and it isn't sukiyaki. Enter a messenger: a pretender to the throne has appeared. Is he or is he not the emperor's true son and heir? The baron will find out--or will he? Boinnng! A knife sprouts in a post beside his head. Swish! Thirty assassins, black-robed like torturers in medieval Europe, jump out of the rhododendrons at him. Snick-snack! The baron, an ineffable swordsman, puts them easily to flight. But alas, the rogues make off with the Lady Kikuji (Keiko Kishi), the baron's sister, and hold her in the Nipponese equivalent of durance vile (same thing, except that the jailer's whip is made of bamboo). In brief, Director Tatsuo Osone has been able to match Hollywood at every point except two--the high-necked kimono is more resistant to bosomy uplift than the Boston board of censors. But along with cues from the U.S., Osone provides some fascinating clues to the Japanese taste and popular spirit. In one scene, for instance, a sort of Japanese Bobby Clark (Shunji Sakai) muddles interminably with some chicken droppings in the baron's parlor; in Japan this was a sure laugh-getter. And then at the end, when the slamming samurai has foiled the villain and won his lady love (Kuniko Ikawa), do they leap into each other's arms? Not at all. The hero rides sadly away, and the sound track sings to the heroine: "Your hawk has flown away . . ./ The bold, dark bird that dare not dwell by your side/ That fears no enemy, nor pain, nor danger/ Yet dreads the wound of the shining sword of love." Tennyson would have loved it.

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