The New Pictures

Crowded Paradise (Tudor) gets into a hopelessly schizoid state by starting out as a documentary on Puerto Ricans in Manhattan and then abruptly shifting gears to become a study of a native American psychopath.

Hume Cronyn, with a manic glint in his eye, plays the superintendent of a West Side apartment house that has been taken over by well-to-do Puerto Ricans. Hume mutters racial slurs against the tenants but his real tragedy is at home, where he cowers under the tongue-lashings of his wife (Nancy Kelly), whom he blinded some years before in a drunken quarrel. Cronyn's prejudice against Puerto Ricans is complicated by his yen for pretty Enid Rudd, who is having troubles of her own convincing her father that she should be allowed to wed Mario Alcalde, a young immigrant who is reduced to working as a dishwasher and living in a rat-infested slum. Villainous Cronyn does his damndest to break up the romance: he attacks the girl in a vestibule, tries to frame Mario with the police.

The film is better than its plot, especially when Cronyn is following the lethal quirks of his troubled mind. And Nancy Kelly, doling out small change to her husband or crushing him with peace-of-mind generalities, makes vivid her role of emotional albatross around Cronyn's neck.

Moby Dick (Moulin; Warner) is certainly the most unusual picture of the year and may well be the best. Producer-Director John Huston set himself an enormous task: to bring to the screen the truth as well as the thrills that Herman Melville poured into his complex masterpiece. What emerges is a brilliant film both for Melville enthusiasts and for those who have tried to read the book and lost their way in the labyrinth of philosophic asides, historical recollections, cetology and archaicisms. Though Huston's Moby Dick is a substitute for the real thing, it is far from a cheap substitute. Behind each surface action lie subterranean echoes from the allegorical deeps of Melville's mind. There is posed not only the search for the "great marble tombstone" of a whale, but also the search for the dark side of a man's soul. Like the book, the film is liquid -the rhythmic, tidal pulse of the ocean shades imperceptibly into the throb of blood in human arteries.

Ray Bradbury's script holds the hypnotic quality of Melville's Biblical-Shakespearean prose, and his lines create images as vivid for the ear as the pictures are for the eye. Most of Huston's plot changes are properly theatrical (except for one jarring contemporary note when Ahab pinpoints his rendezvous with the great whale at Bikini atoll). Richard Basehart's knife fight with another sailor is not in the novel, but it might well be; and Ahab's death, lashed by harpoon lines to the bleeding flank of Moby Dick, seems far righter in film than the book version: Ahab caught by a whistling rope and pulled to the ocean floor.

The film's tremendous visual impact is heightened by a new color process developed by Photographer Oswald Morris which adds black and white to the palette of Technicolor and gives the final print a solidity, depth and texture never before seen on the screen. Scene after scene is imprinted on the mind's eye: the smoky, weathered interior of Spouter Inn; a blazing sun distending against a lemony sky; the tall ship becalmed and quivering in the heat of an oily ocean; the encarnadined seas thrashed to a froth by harpooned whales; the dizzying leap of whaleboats coursing in a "Nantucket sleigh ride"; the green St. Elmo's fire dancing from the ship's spars. And the men: steeple-tall Queequeg, tattooed in blue, like an early Briton; the mad Elijah, a wraith in white, shouting an ancient mariner's curses; Father Mapple, pointing his tufted chin at God as he tells the story of Jonah and the leviathan; and Ahab himself, with the cracked lips and flat eye of the fanatic.

Huston is well served by his international cast. Richard Basehart, as the narrator and sole survivor of the Pequod's crew, perfectly commingles the naivete and intellectual curiosity of the good reporter; Austria's Friedrich Ledebur makes a noble savage of Queequeg, the cannibal harpooner; Orson Welles stirs the imagination with his presailing sermon on the perils of the deep and the demanding nature of Jehovah; Leo Genn is the perfect troubled man of good will as Starbuck, the mate who gravely considers -and rejects -mutiny. The most difficult role, Ahab, is unfortunately handed to the actor probably least able to cope with it: Gregory Peck. Visually, he has an unlucky resemblance to a peg-legged Abe Lincoln, and he is not always convincing as a man at war with Heaven and arrogant enough to "strike the sun if it insulted me." But his failure is only a measure of the high success of the rest of the cast: Peck merely lacks art, not courage or intensity of purpose.

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