The New Pictures

Smiley (London Films; 20th Century-Fox), made in Australia, describes the adventures of an Australian Tom Sawyer named Smiley Greevins (Colin Petersen), with more backblocks yabber than you'll hear from a gum tree full of galahs. Wants a bike, that joey, and you can bet the creeping bent he'll bottom on the gold. He gives up his lollies and embarks on a course of hard yacker for the local John, Sergeant Flaxman (Chips Rafferty). He even swings a government stroke or two for the amen-snorter (Ralph Richardson), bonzer old dag that. It's a zac and a deener and a caser at a time, mind you, but before you can say Yupottipotpong, he's financial. But right then--wouldn't it?--he throws a yonny through the church window and goes flat stoney.

Poor little tug, he's a dead bird for that no-hope shicer (John McCullum) who keeps the local rubbedy, where the cow-cockies and swaggies get shickered up on Saturday night. He's chronic, that man, a bit of a bludger, and maybe even a tea leaf. He not only smoodges Smiley into some mauldy business with the abos, but before you know it, he's up to putty with the new schoolteacher (Jocelyn Hernfield)--now there's a basket of oranges!--whom he would obviously like to blackbird.

When Smiley gets the oil on how he's been done in, he's that sick about it he just humps the bluey, and for the next two days, while the whole mob goes mullocking about the outback with gully-rakers, the boy don't seem to have a bolter's. But they find him, and tell him his crimes were a furphy, and that the real spieler, that gazob at the pub, dropped his bundle and smoked for Sydney till the bible-basher got the leg-rope on him. In the end, of course, a pongo cobber shouts Smiley a bike, and everything is bokker. Got the flaming drill?

Three Violent People (Paramount), a frazzled old carpetbag about a Confederate veteran fighting off a Yankee land-grabber, makes one (and only one) original contribution: Tom Tryon, a 31-year-old bit-part boy from Broadway who, in his first good screen part as the one-armed brother of the hero (Charlton Heston), displays what one publicist has described as "175 pounds of dreamy meat." The boy is a skillful actor. At one point he even manages to steal a scene from Heroine Anne Baxter, who is probably the most relentless camera-hugger in the business.

Gold of Naples (Ponti-De Laurentiis; DCA). Once there was an aging nobleman (Vittorio De Sica) who, having gambled away the better part of his estate, was registered incompetent and placed in the legal guardianship of his wife. The lady, of course, cut off her husband's funds at once, and his fever for the tables raged in impotence. Every day, when he went for his walk, the count would bully the doorman, who, fearing for his job, would force his son (Piero Bilancioni), a boy about ten years old, to play cards with the old rip for the usual stakes: everything the nobleman said he owned against the common bumf that fills a boy's pockets. Invariably the boy would win in a breeze, and the no-count count, pitiful and terrible in his monomania, would stamp off in a rage because the boy would not admit that he was lucky, nothing more.

The Gambler is one of four good reasons why the latest work of Vittorio De Sica (Shoeshine, Bicycle Thief, Umberto D) to be released in the U.S. is a notable example of the rare sort of laughter that leaves in the mind a melancholy aftertone. The three other reasons, equally good, are the other episodes in this masterly collection of Giuseppe Marotta's tales of Naples, translated to the screen by Marotta, De Sica and Scriptwriter Cesare Zavattini.

The Racketeer is about a Neapolitan mountebank (Toto) who lives a dog's life at the heels of un guappo (Pasquale Cennamo)--a big vegetable in the Neapolitan underworld. When the hood has a heart attack, the dog has his day.

Pizza on Credit is about a pizza barker (Giacomo Furia) who is possessed by his possessions: a wife (Sophia Loren) much too pretty to be practical, and an emerald ring much too expensive to be trusted to the feckless likes of her. When she loses it, he finds out rather more than he wants to know.

Theresa, the concluding piece, describes a crisis in the life of a prostitute (Silvana Mangano). Faced with the choice between a bad marriage and the worse trade she has been following, she makes a decision that some would call cynical.

Aside from their esthetic merits, the four stories give heartening evidence that mutiny is in the making aboard Italy's censorship. In 1952, complaining that the neorealist school of moviemakers had formed a gloom brigade that was ruining the foreign market for Italian films, the Italian government forced its state-subsidized movie industry to lower standards and raise skirts. Nevertheless, in Gold of Naples, Director De Sica has managed to say with a smile what he could not have said with a sneer. The four stories are variations on the same theme of human bondage that De Sica develops in all his serious films, and he plays his variations with no less passion and poetic irony because he is playing them for laughs.

The mood, mixing farce and tragedy, is endlessly complex. Yet De Sica continually achieves the casual visual epigram. His camera, like a wise old pickpocket, filches its riches unobtrusively. And the actors seem to fulfill the creator's intentions as naturally as if they were his hands and feet--even De Sica does exactly what De Sica wants. Toto, Italy's Chaplin, is exquisitely funny. Loren's parts fit beautifully into the whole. Mangano for once is convincing, and Paolo Stoppa, as a man who wants all the pleasures of suicide without its aftereffects, is superb. Perhaps best of all is little Piero Bilancioni, who sits to his cards with the ancient face of sin itself. Indeed, Director De Sica's imagination is everywhere so vital, his control of it so gracious and exact, that his meaty little street scenes assume a classic form, a flavor rather like Aristophanic ravioli.

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