The New Pictures

Helen of Troy (Warner). "Seven cities warred for Homer, being dead, wrote Thomas Hey wood, "who, living, had no roof to shroud his head." Two other cities, Rome and Hollywood, which care more about the poet's capacity to turn a profit than a phrase, have recently made an uneasy truce before the walls of Troystrictly, of course, for the sake of plunder.

Last year a Roman studio produced Ulysses, a $3,200,000 version of the Odyssey, but the title role was played by Hollywood Actor Kirk Douglas, and the picture was released in the U.S. by Paramount Pictures. The Iliad is now presented in a $6000,000 production in full color by Warner Bros., but the picture has an Italian heroine, and was actually filmed in Rome's big Cinecitta. In both cases, the blind poet, who wrote as well as any man for the mind's eye, has been translated for the camera's with all possible splendor and yet with considerable propriety too.

Allowing for much practical ellipsis and a few brazen disfigurations (it was Hector, not Paris, who killed Patroclus), the script by John Twist shows a commendable respect for the letter of the myth. It is the spirit that is Twisted. Homer's was a mythic drama in which gods and heroes, love and politics, war and religion moiled in the mortar of imagination. Helen of Troy is basically a story of hot pants in high places. The hero, accordingly, is not "godlike Hector" or "great Achilles" but "soft Paris," whom even Helen called a coward. As the part is written, the "pest of Troy" can actually fight like a Trojan, and, as it is played by Jacques Sernas, the "form divine" is so gorgeously muscular that everybody will understand why that prissy old maid, Athena, flew into such a snit about the boy.

As for about the Helen, Rossana Podesta is a charming girl, but the customers like King Priam (Sir Cedric Hardwicke), may well ask: "Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?" And is this Hector (Harry Andrews), dreadful in his wrath and fierce Achilles (Stanley Baker), both with arms like lath? They look, as on the field of Mars they clash, like aging brokers at a game of squash. They talk like brokers, too, except when the scriptwriter tries to belt out a Homer but winds up with a high-flown foul, e.g., "Tell her she will walk in all my dreams."

The film is most successful when transforms Homeric epithet into moving picture. The frontal assault on Troy is a grand sight-- yet not so grand that the spectator wonders if he has not arrived for the Dardanelles campaign 3,000 years late. The chariot chases are breakneck things. Best of all, though, is the passage in which the colossal horse comes gliding into Troy on a churning revel, like the thought of death on the full flood of life.

The Lieutenant Wore Skirts (20th Century-Fox) is an absent-minded re-scratch of The Seven Year Itch. It may rub sensitive spectators the wrong way, but no matter. Whenever there is a possibility that the audience may get really sore, Actor Tom Ewell applies his soothing sense of humor.

Actor Ewell is again a man whose wife (Sheree North) is out of town, but this time the old Tom does less prowling and more yowling. His wife has gone from family pillow to Air Force post in Hawaii, and that's a two-year trick that Tom refuses to take. Lieut. North, however, seems to enjoy her military duties quite as much as her wifely ones, and husband Ewell is hard pressed to put asunder what the Pentagon has joined together.

He goes to Hawaii. When Sheree refuses to let him live on the air base as "a sort of male camp follower," he decides to aloha the boom. One day she finds him sprawled, like a particularly depraved passage out of Somerset Maugham, in a little grass shack in the banana slums, with not much more than a pith helmet between him and the kind of girl a man likes to have under the palms. She's the cook, he explains. Next day the Mrs. moves the Mr. into Air Force quarters.

She'll be sorry, and so will the customers, as the script strangles them slowly with the husband's apron strings. Now and then, though, that wonderfully funny man lets everybody up for air with a perfect piece of Tomfoolery. What is finally funny about Ewell, though, is not what he does but what he is. He is all the guys who live next door rolled into one, and that one seems to be himself. However, anybody who thinks his act is as natural as it looks will probably believe that clipper ships just naturally sail into bottles.

Golden Demon (Daiei; Harrison). The Japanese soul has been described as a lotus bud stitched up to look like a big-league baseball. In it, the traditional Eastern longing for a spiritual flowering is crudely merged with the modern Western urge to get to first base. Golden Demon, except for Hiroshima the only postwar picture from Japan in which the U.S. moviegoer can learn anything specific about 20th century Japanese life, tells a story of how this broken culture broke two lovers' hearts.

The picture is a screen adaptation of Koyo Ozaki's Konjiki Yasha (Golden Demon); written at century's turn, it was one of the first Japanese novels ever set in the troubled here and unmitigated now, and it spurred the rising revolution in Japanese letters. As the picture tells it, the story is well calculated to soak as many crying towels as any other late Victorian romance. Miya (Fujiko Yamamoto) and Kan-ichi (Jun Negami), an orphan, grow up together in her father's house, fall in love, and are properly betrothed. A rich young man appears and speaks for Miya's hand. Her parents, who later say that they "must have been possessed by a golden demon," urge her to break with poor Kan-ichi and take the rich man. Blinded by duty, Miya accepts. Insane with pain, Kan-ichi shrieks that "from this night forward I cease to be a human." Since money has mastered him, he will master money. He becomes a loan shark. Miya, meanwhile, is miserable with her wealthy husband, and he with her. Eventually, Miya and Kan-ichi meet again in the ashes of their misspent youth, and begin a new life together.

To a Western moviegoer, the most rewarding thing about this otherwise simple-minded film--except for the breathtaking color--is the insight it gives into middle-class family life in Japan. One moment the moviegoer feels as if he were sitting down to dinner in Dubuque; the next he sits watching patterns of behavior as eerily irrelevant to his experience and feelings as bird tracks on the moon--or, indeed, as most Oriental music is. Still, the picture does communicate a vivid sense that life, even in a Westernized Japan, is not so much an experience to be lived as a ritual to be performed. The ritual, when fervently enacted, tames the natural dragon and reveals the spiritual treasure. When played without feeling, or so this story seems to say, the drama of convention turns into a tragedy of manners, in which the empty pursuit of virtue runs parallel with the race for riches. "For what shall it profit a man," the story seems slyly to ask sometimes, "if he shall gain his own soul and lose the whole world?"

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