The New Pictures

Fear Strikes Out (Paramount) rolls Frank Merriwell and Sigmund Freud into a ball and then lines it out for a solid hit. The film is based on the widely read autobiography of Jim Piersall. the fleet-footed outfielder of the Boston Red Sox, who suffered an emotional collapse five years ago which almost ended his career before it began. Unlikely as it may look from the bleachers, Piersall suffered from what has been called the Laius complex.* Piersall's father (Karl Malden), according to the script, was a wild ball hawk whose wings were clipped by family responsibilities, and who determined to live out his own lost life in the person of his son (Anthony Perkins). In psychological effect, the father murdered the son, and reanimated the boy's body with his own soul, in particular with his own pathological appetite for acclaim.

Almost before little Jim learned to walk, father taught him to play ball. Every day after school he made the boy run. slide, throw, catch until his hands hung dead on his wrists. "We're going for the big leagues, boy," he would mutter fiercely, and the child would nod fiercely in agreement. At 17 Jim was a spectacular outfielder whose all-round talents won the state championship for his high-school team; but his father was never satisfied. "How'd I do, dad?" Jim asked anxiously after playing a prodigious game. And father implacably replied, "Not bad, son. But you weren't on your toes all the time, and you know it." Jim nodded dully, and the minute his father was not looking he gobbled a fistful of aspirin. Funny how those headaches would come on all of a sudden.

Jim never told anyone about his headaches, not even when they became chronic--a round-the-clock ring of obsessive fathers hurling baseball, baseball, baseball at his head. He certainly did not dare to tell his father. The only time Jim ever really interfered with father's ambitions--he sprained an ankle in a skating fall--the old man had a heart attack. After that, since mother Piersall was an invalid too, Jim was the sole support of his family; and as the pressure to make good got stronger, the headaches got worse.

At 17 Jim was signed by the Red Sox, farmed out to Scranton. He was tremendous as a rookie, batting third in the league. "Well," said father Piersall, "that isn't first." So next year, stoked with aspirin and desperation, Jim burned up the base lines and copped the batting title. At 21 he was called up to the Red Sox. It was the big test. Could he pass it? The dread of failing--failing to live up to his father's demands--threw him into a manic panic. One day in midseason, as the picture tells the story, Jim Piersall went berserk on the ball field and woke up in a straitjacket.

From there out the movie's scenes explain, without too much professional slang and yet without talking down to the cheap seats, how Jim came to see the irony of the words he once hurled in anger at his psychiatrist (Adam Williams): "Listen! If it hadn't been for [my father] standing behind me and pushing me and driving me, I wouldn't be where I am today!"

The success of this inexpensive ($1,000,000), unpretentious picture reads a useful lesson to Hollywood's powerful "Vienna Lobby," a rapidly growing group of psychiatric doctrinaires who seem to feel that an alienist's progress chart makes the best story board. Fear Strikes Out is not the history of an illness but the story of a human life; it does not attempt to acquaint the mind with theories and statistics but to educate the heart with compassion and understanding. And by these means it will probably do more than anything Hollywood has ever found in its bag of psychiatricks to teach the general public how a man much like any other can be driven out of his mind, and how with care and wisdom he can be restored to reason.

Chief credit for this contribution goes to Scriptwriters Ted Berkman and Raphael Blair, who have shaped a formless book into tight, dramatic scenes. Director Robert Mulligan, a 31 -year-old veteran of television, has seconded them shrewdly, and Actor Maiden finds in the father frightening depths of pain, confusion and animal sadness.

But the man who will probably get the loudest cheers from the public grandstands is 24-year-old Actor Perkins. In his first starring role he ranges from insane violence to romantic tenderness to stylish farce with an ease that has left no doubt in Hollywood's mind that he holds strong cards as an actor. However, Actor Perkins' ace in the hole is charm -- a gangling, gulp-and-golly, never-been-kissed sort of charm that seems likely to answer one of Hollywood's more troubling questions: Where is the next Jimmy Stewart coming from?

The Red Balloon (Lamorisse; Lopert). Pascal had a big balloon. Its cheeks were red as a pippin. And everywhere that Pascal went, the balloon was sure to slip in. It followed him to school one day, which made an awful stench. It made the children laugh and play to see a balloon in French.

As a matter of fact, moviegoers of all ages will find themselves laughing, and sometimes sighing, as Pascal and his friend pursue their private life in a world that does not seem to understand the care and feeding of young balloons -- and maybe not of small boys, either.

In this 34-minute cinemallegory, made in Paris by Producer Albert Lamorisse and starring his six-year-old son Pascal, every loose string of the narrative leads somehow to an inflated symbol in the Gallic manner. But how can anybody be annoyed with symbols (even though they do not pop as pertly as an old symbol-master like Rene Clair might wish) that are invariably lipstick-red and lighter-than-air?

True Story of Jesse James (20th Century-Fox) is that 75 years after he was done to death by that "dirty little coward who shot Mr. Howard," he is still robbing the people--though nowadays, as moviegoers with any sense of historic irony may remark, it is the long arm of the banking community that runs through the gun sleeve of the 19th century's most storied bank robber. In the last 35 years, the moneymen have cheerfully financed at least a dozen pictures* about the character who was once their deadliest enemy, an enthusiasm perhaps best explained by the fact that from this crude movie alone the banks will make ten times as much money out of Jesse James as he ever made out of them.

Perhaps it is only natural that the script should be friendly to the central character. Through most of the picture he is presented as a man more robbed than robbing, an honest Missouri dirt farmer who was driven to desperate ventures by the cruel Yankee-panky of his neighbors in the days that followed the Civil War. "He's just a man," somebody sobs, "who loves his family and his home." Matter of fact, as Robert Wagner plays the part with soft suburban face, the hero could pass for a rising young broker. As for all that gunplay, it seems to have been nothing more than James & Co.'s old-fashioned interpretation of the Personalized Approach.

The Brave One (King Brothers; Universal-International). One wild, dark night on the Mexican altiplanicie, the wind screamed and the rain beat and the lightning felled a great branch on a cow, a mother of fighting bulls. By sheer might of instinct, the valiant beast survived long enough to drop her bull calf and to bellow until help came. It was a small boy (Michel Ray), the son of a Mexican vaquero, who found the hungry black buster where he wailed indignantly in the cold and wet, and carried him back to finish his first night in a warm bed. Gitano (gypsy) the boy called him. The two were inseparable, but very little else was safe within a rope's length of that savage young fighter. He charged the chickens, butted the bucket, larked with the laundry; when the time for branding came, it took seven good men to catch the black yearling and four to hold him down.

As a two-year-old, when the ranch held its tienta (test) for the young bulls, Gitano astounded the company with his fighting qualities: he knocked the picador's horse sprawling and gored one of the capemen. The boy was proud, but he was sad too. In two years Gitano would be sent to the corrida to be artistically butchered for the pleasure of the public.

The rest of this little picture, which despite a clumsy production is probably going to flood the Easter Bunny with zillions of requests for baby bulls, describes the fantastic things the boy does to save the life of his pet. Nevertheless, the moviemakers have seen to it that the picture comes to a bloody climax in one of the most thrillingly realistic bullfights --starring the famous Mexican matador, Fermin Rivera--ever seen in a commercial film. It's great stuff for the youngsters, but apt to be rough on people of more tender years.

* Laius in the Greek myth was the father of Oedipus. Laius tried to kill his son in infancy, but the boy grew up and killed his father instead.

* Among them: Jesse James As the Outlaw (1921), Jesse James Under the Black Flag (1921), Jesse James (1927), Days of Jesse James (1939), Jesse James at Bay (1941), Jesse James Jr. (1942), Jesse James Rides Again (1947), Jesse James' Women (1954), Jesse James v. the Daltons (1954). A coming attraction, Hell's Crossroads, was originally titled I Was Jesse James' Next Door Neighbor.

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