The New Pictures

Hill 24 Doesn't Answer (Sikor; Continental) because its four defenders are dead. Produced in Israel, the film keeps its flag-waving to a commendable minimum while giving a kaleidoscopic record of the savage fighting between Jew and Arab in the 1948 war. The doomed patrol of three men and a Yemenite girl get their stories told in a series of flashbacks. The first and best concerns Edward Mulhare, a Christian Irishman who starts out as a British plainclothesman and ends up serving in the Israeli ranks because of his love for a Jewish girl, sensitively played by Haya Hararit. The second tells of Michael Wager, a Jew from New York City (but, refreshingly, not from Brooklyn), who is both wounded and briefly disillusioned in an unsuccessful attack in the Old City of Jerusalem. This episode gives a cleanly realistic picture of street fighting: instead of charging pell-mell at the enemy, the Israelis advance in twos and threes, hugging the walls of houses and making quick dashes for the protection of doorways and abutments.

The final sequence is the most frankly chauvinistic and the least convincing: hard-bitten Arieh Lavi captures a wounded Egyptian soldier whom he then discovers to be an ex-Nazi officer. Except for this flawed sequence, Britain's Director Thorold (Angel Street) Dickinson has imaginatively caught the almost tribal ferocity of a small war.

I Died a Thousand Times (Warner) is a frippery remake of the stark 1941 High Sierra starring Humphrey Bogart. As it emerges from the Hollywood mill this time, the film has a theme nearly as silly as its new title: it argues that society should not put a confirmed criminal behind bars because he may resent it. Jack Palance, paroled after eight years in the pen, shows his exasperation by rapping assorted citizens on the skull with his gun butt and putting a slug into a guard who gets in his way.

Only two characters glimpse the true lovableness beneath his gruff exterior. One is a cunning mongrel dog named Pard; the other, an equally cunning gun moll named Marie (Shelley Winters). Palance finds them in a mountain hideout where he holes up to plan his' next caper -the stickup of the exclusive Tropico Hotel. Shelley keeps mooning at the snowy WarnerColor peaks of the High Sierras and speculating that it must be mighty clean up there. "Cold, too," says Jack, and goes back to laying his plans. Scripter W. R. (This Gun For Hire) Burnett still has about 30 minutes to kill before he can get around to his killing finish; so he sends Palance off on a romantic goose chase after a farmer's daughter (Lori Nelson), who has a tendency to the same high-flown appreciation of CinemaScopic nature as Shelley. "My!" Lori trills. "Isn't the air grand out here on the desert? And look at those stars -aren't they beautiful?" It is small wonder that Palance goes berserk at the film's end and gets himself shot down by a battalion of police.

Rebel Without a Cause (Warner) is a reasonably serious attempt, within the limits of commercial melodrama, to show that juvenile delinquency is not just a local outbreak of tenement terror but a general infection of modern U.S. society.

The story begins in a police station in a pleasant upper-middle-class suburb. Half a dozen teen-agers are hauled in for questioning, among them a boy (James Dean) who has just moved into the neighborhood. He is drunk. Why? He does not know. He only knows that his mother wears the pants in the family. "She eats my father alive, and he takes it. How can a guy grow up in a circus like that? They are tearing me apart."

Next day, the first day of school, Dean is greeted by his classmates as "a new disease," and during a field trip to the planetarium, a leather-jacketed roughneck slashes a tire on his car. "You read too many comic books." says Dean. They fight with knives. Dean wins. The boy challenges him to a "chickie run" -a dash to the edge of a cliff in two stolen cars; first man to jump out before the cars go over the brink is "chicken." Caught between folly and disgrace. Dean asks his father what to do. Father funks out. Dean makes the run. The other boy is killed.

Dean decides to tell the police. His parents, horrified of notoriety, say no. "You can't be idealistic," his father pleads. Dean explodes: "A kid was killed! Every time you can't face yourself, you blame it on me." In the end, still another adolescent goes to a senseless death.

The strong implication of this picture is that the real delinquency is not juvenile but parental. The point may be obvious and only a part of the problem, but it is well worth propounding. The best thing about the film, in any case, is James Dean, the gifted actor who made his movie start in East of Eden, and was killed last month at 24 in an automobile accident. In this, the second of his three movie roles -Giant will probably be released next year -there is further evidence that Actor Dean was a player of unusual sensibility and charm.

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