The New Pictures

The Conqueror (RKO Radio). An American traveler in Central Asia once asked a Mongolian herdsman where America was. "In West Russia," he replied. This picture, which purports to be based on the life of the young Genghis Khan, carries a strong suggestion that, to Hollywood's way of thinking, Mongolia is in the western U.S. The part of the "Perfect Warrior"--a man who became a supreme statesman and lawgiver as well as the most formidable military genius in Asiatic history--is played by Hollywood's best-known cowboy, John Wayne. And does he gallop across the steppe, as the young Temujin did, on a hairy little Mongol pony? You bet your yurt he doesn't. The sleek horseflesh in this picture would just about last one night in the average steppe pasture at 10 below.

Now in his day "the Accursed," as the Great Khan was known, did lots of nasty things to lots of people. When he was still a boy, he murdered one of his halfbrothers, and before his death at 65, his armies had slaughtered millions from the Dnieper to the China Sea. Wayne's performance should go a long way toward paying the old warrior back. He portrays the great conqueror as a sort of cross between a square-shootin' sheriff and a Mongolian idiot. The idea is good for a couple of snickers, but after that it never Waynes but it bores.

"This Tartar woman is fer me," drawls Big John through his Fu Manchu mustache as Susan ("much woman") Hayward goes dawdling sensuously through the desert on a litter borne by sweating slaves. He kills her guards and carries her off. "Know this, woman," gruffs Wayne, looking about as uncomfortable as a right tackle caught reading Swinburne, "I take you fer wife." But as he pulls Hayward hayward, Hayward pulls away. "For me," she snarls, "there is no ease while you live, Mongol." Says John: "Yer beooduful in yer wrath." He takes her on a trip to the court of the Wang Khan, where they watch a sinuous dancing girl from Samarkand. After a night in Samarkand, John taunts her, "All other wimmin are like the secon' pressing uh the grape." Going at it that way, the terror of two continents takes almost two full hours to win one girl, so the script just skips the conquest of Asia. It apparently wasn't very important, anyway. This picture reveals that what really mattered to Genghis Khan was love. "She," he sighs wistfully, "is my destiny."

Forbidden Planet (M-G-M). In recent years, though many a Thing has landed on the movie screen, the Space it came from has always, all too obviously, been located between a scriptwriter's ears; and the science in the fiction has generally been of a sophomore sort that gives a loud wolf-whistle at the curvature of the universe. In this nifty interstellar meller, however, the gadgets are so much more glamorous than any girl could be that in many scenes the heroine is technologically unemployed. The special effects should convince any wavering space cadet that it's ether/or; and the literately preposterous script by Cyril Hume will probably strike most grownups as being just as plausible as any irrational number.

The United Planets Cruiser C-57-D, soaring along on its quanto-gravitetic hyperdrive, is more than a year out from Earth Base on a special mission to the planetary system of Alpha Aquilae. As it approaches the Planet Altair-4, it changes flux, reverses polarity, sits down gently as great hairy bolts of blue electricity spray out to cushion the landing. Gangways flip down; scouts run out. The sky is green, the surrounding desert an odd shade of pink. Suddenly a big. black robot drives up, addresses the commander (Leslie Nielsen) in cultured English, invites him to visit the planet's only human inhabitant, a mad scientist (Walter Pidgeon). This Dr. Morbius, sole survivor of a party of colonists sent from Earth 20 years before, greets his visitors coldly beside a lavender tree, and reluctantly asks them into his villa, a sort of ranch house with ailerons, where the robot synthesizes a snack and serves it.

The commander's suspicions are aroused when Morbius discloses that all the other colonists were murdered by a telluric demon that seems to inhabit the planet. The commander is wondering whether he should arrest the scientist, when a beautiful girl (Anne Francis) walks in. She is Morbius' daughter, Altaira, and she has never seen an available male before. The captain, who has not seen a woman for more than a year, decides to give Morbius a chance and Altaira a try.

One night the spaceship is assaulted by an invisible monster who leaves footprints like those of a colossal tree sloth, and is completely invulnerable to any kind of atomic attack. Accused by the commander, Morbius reveals his secret: Altair was once inhabited by a race of creatures, the Krell, whose technology was a million years ahead of mankind's. They vanished mysteriously, in a single night, even as they realized their greatest achievement: a civilization without instrumentalities, force without form, spirit without substance. They became, in a word, gods. Or did they? On paper, the answer to this question would seem to nix the picture's intellectual respectability once and for all, but on the screen it makes King Kong look like an organ grinder's monkey, and will probably have the most skeptical scientist in the audience clutching wildly for his atomic pistol.

Serenade (Warner) seems to indicate that humpty-dumpty Tenor Mario Lanza has put himself together again. He had a great fall several years ago when he rolled off the top of the heap for no apparent reason but his own fat--over 250 lbs. of it, with an undue proportion apparently located in the head. This picture proves that he is still the biggest thing in the cinemusic business: at "singing weight" (240 lbs.), he looks like a colossal ravioli set on toothpicks, and his face, aflame with rich living, has much the appearance of a gigantic red pepper. But the big voice is just as big as ever, and though no better for training, it does not seem to be any worse for the careless wear he gives it. Lanza still can rattle a teacup at 20 paces with his high C, and with this picture he seems sure to rattle the cash registers all across the land.

To Mariophiles, the plot of the picture, credited to a novel by James M. Cain, may seem to derive just as much from the uneven tenor of Lanza's own legend. A boy of humble birth meets a woman of wealth (Joan Fontaine) who pays for his singing lessons. He falls in love with her and she plays at love with him, but en the night of his debut at the Metropolitan Opera. House (in Otello), she runs away with a sculptor. Heartbroken, he walks offstage in the middle of an aria, flies to Mexico to get lost. Drink leads to fever, and he is found near death in a Mexican hotel room by a pretty senorita (Sarita Montiel) who soon has him back in fighting trim, singing voice, marrying mood. The story, in any case, is no more than a cheap strip of florist's tape intended to bind a daisy chain of well-known arias from the Italian operas, but the selections come so thick and fast that the picture grows to seem just a vulgar funeral wreath for the operatic tradition. Lanza, moreover, sings everything as though it were "Sorrento"--at the top of his lungs. At his best, in an aria from Der Rosenkavalier, he smears Richard Strauss's deft parody on Italian opera with suitable quantities of tomato sauce and Verdigris. In his acting, toor the tenor seems desperately afraid he will not be noticed. His eyes flash, his lips twitch, his nostrils flare, and great shudders run through his body as he mutters hoarsely to a fellow he has just met: "How do you do?" On the lifting of an eyebrow, Lanza often expends as much energy as might normally be required to lift a piano through a tenth-story window. This is not, as the singer seems to think, operatic acting. It is just smarm.

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