The New Pictures

Vitelloni (API-Jamus). A dying art, like a rotting fruit, may hold the seed of a new birth. In Italy, as the so-called realistic cinema has decayed, a vital new talent has emerged: Federico Fellini. Last summer La Strada (The Road) revealed him to U.S. audiences as an artist of uncertain means but of startling sensibility. Vitelloni, completed in 1953, a year before La Strada, secured Fellini's fame in Europe. It is a finer piece of work than La Strada in every way. Technically, it is an elegant exercise in cinematic diction. Literarily, it is a murderous satire curiously infused with tenderness for the thing it destroys.

The title means "the big calves" in Italian, but it is perhaps most idiomatically translated as "the slobs." The slobs in question are the sons of some middle-class families in a small city in Italy. In body they are full-grown males, but at heart they are just big bambini. Though finished with school, they cannot quite bring themselves to take jobs. Supported by indulgent families, they sleep till noon, spend the rest of the day at the poolroom or on the beach, talking about girls they seldom get or wishing they were somewhere far away. Sometimes, there is nothing to do but mambo along the sidewalk, or just grow sideburns. At night they get drunk on money cadged from their working sisters, and tiptoe delicately to bed in the wee hours. They are terrified of their fathers, but bathetically sentimental about their doting mothers.

Fausto (Franco Fabrizi), the biggest of the slobs, is a charming young chump who spends most of his life salting the local quail. When a beauty contest winner gets pregnant, he tries to leave town, but his father catches him on the wing, makes him marry the girl (Leonora Ruffo). His father-in-law then forces him to take a job in a shop that sells religious objects. Fausto tries to relieve his misery by flirting with the boss's wife, gets fired for his pains. Not long after, he spends the night with a showgirl (Maja Nipora), comes home smeared with lipstick, wakes up to find wife and baby gone. After a desperate search, Fausto discovers them both at his father's house, but unfortunately he finds his father too, who gives him a good, old-fashioned spanking.

The nimbleness, the knowingness, the irony, the sharp observation of small-town life in all this has hardly been surpassed on the screen. Moreover, there is a sense of the unpredictable flow of life, even though in Vitelloni it is only the sloshing of stale water in a very small pot, that gives to everything Fellini does a kind of tidal vitality. Fellini sees his people straight and whole, most warmly and naturally loves them and hates them, and takes them as they are. It is one measure of Fellini's superiority to most of his neorealist colleagues in the Italian film industry that he does not trouble his head, or his audiences, with social problems as such; on the reactionary assumption (which horrifies his Communist critics) that societies are made up of people, Fellini simply makes pictures about people's problems.

And in Fellini's hands, people sometimes seem more important than the screen has made them appear for years; they seem larger, somehow, even the lowliest and most hopelessly lost among them.

Friendly Persuasion (Allied Artists] is a nice, folksy costume comedy that tries to say something serious about the relation --and the lack of it--between private morals and public life. Before the picture ever reached the screen it was accused of malpracticing what it preaches. Scriptwriter Michael Wilson, who cinemadapted the 1945 bestseller by Jessamyn West, was denied a screen credit for his work because he pleaded the Fifth Amendment in 1951 in refusing to answer questions before the House Un-American Activities Committee. The studio, a small outfit, was of no mind to risk its principal ($3,200,000) for principle. Be that as it may, Wilson's too-earnest but sometimes charming script is the best thing about the picture; for Director William Wyler, who often seems a pretty citified feller in all these country doings, it will probably make the difference between a hit and a miss.

The story tells what happened to a Quaker family in southern Indiana during the Civil War. The big question: If the Rebels come raiding, can the Friends, in all conscience, fight? Mother (Dorothy McGuire) says no, but then she is a prim old bim who says no to everything. Josh Birdwell (Anthony Perkins), the elder son. is otherwise inclined: "Would you stand by while, others die to protect you?'' Father (Gary Cooper) doesn't rightly know his own mind, but this he does allow: "Man's life ain't wuth a hill uh beans, less'n he lives up ta his own conshunce." He lets the boy go fight for his country, for his manhood; but Father decides to fight "for a better way uh settlin' things." The climax hammers home,a truth that is plainly just as true for ordinary men as it is for the great nations they add up to: war is where you find it. but peace is where you make it.

In all this there is only one clear fault to be called.' but it is a crippling one. Director Wyler seems to have learned everything he knows about deep country from the double-truck color spreads in Better Homes and Gardens. The pastures are sometimes dyed a fluorescent green that would surely blind a cow. The fences organize the landscape as artfully as if it were a Fifth Avenue window. And that dear little Bucks County farmhouse with the walk-in fireplace and the lovely Shaker furniture is the one that every Sunday driver has been looking for all his life.

The Opposite Sex (MGM) is one of Hollywood's weirder experiments with taste--the effect, in this case, roughly resembling a dill pickle smothered with whipped cream.

The picture is based on Playwright Clare Boothe Luce's 1936 play, The Women. The play was made into a picture in 1939, and audiences of that time enjoyed the satirical thrusts and hair-pulling matches. In this version, however, Producer Joe Pasternak has sugared everything up with pretty Metrocolor, with June Allyson, who plays the spirited heroine as a teary little dearie, and with a batch of sentimental tunes. Worse still, the Fay and Michael Kanin script carelessly tosses away one of the play's best ideas. There are men in the picture. In the play, men never appeared; it was as if the world were one vast, closed powder room. And though the scriptwriters have kept the play's plain plot (gossip wrecks marriage, husband marries golddigger, wife gets him back), they have jazzed it up with plenty of new wisecracks--some of them acute, others merely cute.

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