The New Pictures

Island in the Sun (Darryl F. Zanuck; 20th Century-Fox), an unraveling of Alec Waugh's 1955 bestseller, is Moviemaker Zanuck's first lone-wolf production since he left Fox. This turbid plot-boiler clearly rates a special award as the sexiest West Indian travelogue ever made. The mating season is always in full swing on the throbbing Caribbean isle of Santa Marta, which doubtless boasts the highest imaginary birth rate of any 50-mile-long island under the sun. Island employs even the unsubtle cinema device of the screen-bottom exit, pointed up with gasps and romantic rustlings after its clinching couples drop from view.

The disjointed welter of plots occasionally departs from animal husbandry to dwell upon balmy Santa Marta's social and racial ferments. It seems that the happy islanders, almost all of some Negro ancestry, sometimes get irritated by the snootiness of the British colonial plantation owners. Their self-seeking messiah (played like a talking totem pole by Singer Harry Belafonte) is trying to improve their lot by shaking hands with all of them, sullenly muttering into his champagne at white folks' garden parties, making louder speeches over coconut milk about his dedication to equality and self-government. Belafonte's biggest job, however, is evading the clutches of a white cargo named Mavis (Joan Fontaine), obviously too old for him.

Toying with its theme of race relations under the palms, Island abounds in mixed-blood romances without showing any interracial kisses. A dusky lovely (seductively portrayed by Dorothy Dandridge) easily captures the governor's panting aide-de-camp. Another temptress (Joan Collins), led for a while to believe she has Negro blood, drags the governor's son into sudden paternity. Her half brother (James Mason), who really does have Negro blood, imagines that he is also a cuckold, and so murders his supposed rival in a fit of pique. The movie's single solid acting job is by John Williams as a shrewd constabulary chief. The movie gets no distance at all in solving Santa Marta's color problem, but the color photography is beautiful.

Sweet Smell of Success (Hecht, Hill and Lancaster; United Artists) is a high-tension jolt into the rat-eat-rat, rat-tat-tattle world of a monstrous Broadway columnist (Burt Lancaster) and his favorite hatchetman (Tony Curtis), a pressagent who has swapped his soul for a mess of items. No self-respecting vulture would be caught in the company of these carrion slingers. Says Curtis the flack of Lancaster the gossipist: "You got him for a friend; you don't need an enemy!" Says Burt to Tony: "I'd hate to take a bite out of you. You're a cookie full of arsenic."

In purveying the sweet smell of success to his 60 million readers, the megalomaniac columnist pursues his unfragrant profession along the classic line once defined by Edgar Lee Masters: "To scratch dirt over scandal for money,/ And exhume it to the winds for revenge,/ Or to sell papers . . ." Where scandal is lacking, Tony, whose mind functions like a sewage disposal plant, simply invents it about nonclients in order to assure his clients of continued favorable mentions in Burt's fodderol. Case in point: a jazz guitar player (Marty Milner) with a marrying yen for Burt's sister (Susan Harrison). Burt, for reasons never made clear ("You're all I've got"), objects so violently to his sister's boy friend that Tony must undertake a character assassination. A Communist taint and a pack of crazy cigarettes are forthwith hung on the young musician. But the snow-white alliance of true love and unbending virtue gives Burt and Tony their eventual dirty-black comeuppances.

Sweet Smell, which could have been offal, is raised to considerable dramatic heights by intense acting, taut direction (by Alexander Mackendrick), superb camera work (by James Wong Howe) about Times Square and in Manhattan's chicquest bistros, and, above all, by its whiplash dialogue, which bears the unmistakable crackle of Co-Writer Clifford Odets.

The Prince and the Showgirl (Warner) lifts Marilyn Monroe to the probable ceiling of her serious career as a comedienne. It also leaves her ankle-high to such giants of the theater as her fellow performers, Producer-Director Laurence Olivier (her costar) and cloud-capped Dame Sybil Thorndike. Based on Playwright Terence Rattigan's London hit, The Sleeping Prince, the movie embroils a U.S. chorus cutie (Marilyn) in a Balkan intrigue imported to London by some small-bore royalty there for the coronation of King George V in 1911.

Eager for a sleepless night after days of plotting, His Grand Ducal Highness Charles (Olivier), regent of a strategic buffer map speck, has Marilyn whisked from her theater to the Carpathian embassy for a romp around the sofa. Though Showgirl Monroe will not play the Grand Duke's romantic game because he is so essentially ignorant of love, she is soon wise to his political game. He is scheming to prevent a democratic revolution from prematurely enthroning his own son, a boy king without portfolio, as Carpathia's popular monarch. Olivier's mother-in-law, the Queen Dowager (Dame Sybil), neither as deaf nor as blind as she puts on, takes a fancy to Marilyn, even drags her along to the coronation as her borrowed-necklaced lady in waiting for a day. In the end, the showgirl enthralls all, capturing their hearts with her naivete and their practical Balkan minds with her directness. Estranged father and son are reconciled; Carpathia is saved for democracy ; Marilyn may even become ex-Regent Olivier's consort after the Carpathian coronation ball is over.

Such a bagatelle of a plot demands--and gets from Dame Sybil and Sir Laurence--high acting to fetch high comedy. From Marilyn it gets a spasmodic effort to conquer the awesome heights. Her most persuasive line is just plain "Gosh!"-but it is never clear whether she is overwhelmed by the dictates of the script or the awesome dramatic company she is keeping. Parading and posing with an even more voluptuous silhouette than most 1911 showgirls had, Marilyn is alternately spirited and lethargic. Especially in her tussling with Olivier, she seems more directed by him than acting with him--as if by wiggling his off-camera ear he gives her the cue to giggle. Conversely, Olivier, almost embarrassed by being an on-camera Svengali. often appears to stoop gallantly to make his protegee as towering as he is. The highlights of any such Graustarkian foolishness usually, though strangely, come when Graustark momentarily seems real. Olivier does the trick, facing Marilyn's gee-whiz antics on their carriage-borne way to Westminster Abbey, when he cracks the faintest smile in film history. Marilyn does not achieve it when she cracks a glycerin tear in supposedly stunned awe of the choir-thundering coronation sequence.

Beyond Mombasa (Columbia). "The natives," observes one sweat-drenched bwana, "are growing uneasy." Then one of them catches it right in the back--a poisoned dart from a blowgun. He's a goner, of course, as soon as the stuff hits his bloodstream. More nervous mumbling from the natives ("They say this is a bad omen"). Evil forces are clearly trying to prevent Cornel Wilde from rediscovering the uranium mine found by his late brother, poor devil, who was murdered by a steel-clawed Leopard Man. Also barring his way, on his Technicolor plunge into spine-tingling British East Africa, are a process-shot wild elephant, some oinking hippos, a surly cobra and a platoon of phony-looking crocodiles.

This movie might better have been titled "The Treasure of Sierra Mombasa" or "King Solomon's Mimes." With snarling distrust and open greed. Hero Wilde keeps a bloodshot eye on his brother's two partners, now his. because they are just as mean and avaricious as he is. In fact, Wilde distrusts the whole safari--even the coy lady anthropologist (Donna Reed) and her missionary uncle (Leo Genn), and certainly the natives, as shifty-eyed a pack as ever whetted spears. The snail's pace direction makes it seem they will never find that blasted mine.

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