The New Pictures

The Rising of the Moon (Warner) is a trilogy of Ireland, a feature film entirely Irish both in locale of its scenes and soul of its makers, who include the Maine-born director, John Ford (real name: Sean O'Fearna). As if to disprove W. B. Yeats's old lament, "Romantic Ireland's dead and gone," Ford fought his way through Limerick and Galway and Dublin, pushing his cameras and a troupe of Ireland's best actors before him. In dramatic meanderings most of the commonplaces of the native character are trotted forth--that the Irish are unpredictably gay and gloomy by turns, revile England, drink prodigiously, talk blarney sideways and billingsgate straight--and are the stuff of which natural-born actors are made.

The first of the three offerings, The Majesty of the Law, based on a short story by Frank O'Connor, is the tale of a village patriarch who suffers from an excess of pride. It is a feeling often easier to portray by word than to dissect on film. By the time the bearded old curmudgeon (well bellowed by Noel Purcell) presents himself at the local jail to do time for cudgeling an old enemy, the viewer has been made aware several times over that the old boy would rather cut off his beard than pay his -L-5 fine--and wants to see and hear no more commotion about it.

Another episode (1921), drawn from Lady Gregory's one-act play The Rising of the Moon, is tinged with macabre humor that bids to be incredible. Perhaps only the Irish themselves can see the joke in a gallows. During Ireland's Black and Tan ordeal of rebellion "troubles" in 1921, a horde of citizens, ostensibly thumbing their beads, conspire to rescue a Condemned young revolutionary from his British jailers. Wearing saucy high heels under their false habits, two fake nuns thoroughly enjoy their patriotic lark at the death cell, wink, exchange secret smiles and repress girlish giggles while a fine broth of a boy barely escapes the noose.

A Minute's Wait, the longest and best of the lot, is a back-thwacking, shillyshally riot of slapstick. A train--a gruesome Irish hybrid of the Toonerville Trolley and a Long Island Railroad local --pulls into Dunfaill for a minute's stop. Its motley passengers immediately spill out into the station bar and some hilarious vignettes. To make room for a goat, a bewildered British couple are demoted from their first-class compartment into third, there to rub insensitive feelers with a slithering mess of outraged Irish lobsters. A sweater-girl (full-blown by Maureen Connell) snares a husband under the diverted beak of her matchmaking aunt. Even the bar-girl gets a romantic Irish proposal: "How would you like to be buried with my people?" After many minutes' wait the uproarious caravan pro ceeds on its way, leaving the pleasant feeling that if the Dunfaill stop was a fair sample, God must surely smile on the Irish railways.

Fire Down Below (Warwick; Columbia) rises high and could have soared higher but for a curious fact: its proper beginning seems uncomfortably wedged in its middle. Two of the three principals disappear in the midst of the story for half an hour of screen time. The curious result is a fast-paced adventure yarn laced around a taut interlude of high drama.

The great bond between Robert Mitchum, small-boat captain and Caribbean smuggler, and Rita Hayworth, a stateless tramp ill-used by a long succession of lechers, is mutual worthlessness. They've both had it; all that's left for them is each other. Mitchum utters life-weary lines and Rita wears hers under her eyes. But Scripter Irwin Shaw has imbued the two with so much vitality that the characters emerge intact, and a movie whose eye sometimes strays from subtle human values to trite box-office appeal (e.g., a superfluous chromium-plated Mardi Gras festival) survives as a sharp study of three lost souls in crisis.

The film, shot in Trinidad, begins with deceptive ordinariness when Mitchum and his boat partner (Jack Lemmon) agree to haul Rita, freshly discarded by a mousy Detroit businessman, from Puerto Rico to an island where passports are less important. Lemmon, a clean-cut Midwesterner, sees Rita at first as a wild oat, ripe for harvest, but soon perceives that her true calling is to be his domesticated passion flower. When Mitchum tries to protect his young pal from Jezebel Hayworth, all he gets is a clout on the jaw. Then comes a fine sequence, which begins when Mitchum betrays Lemmon to the Coast Guard in a moment of pique. Lemmon escapes the law, ships on a tramp steamer to return to Mitchum's hideaway island and kill him. But there is a collision at sea and Lemmon is pinned in the wreckage. In their efforts to extricate him, a young Navy lieutenant (Bonar Colleano) and a grizzled doctor (Bernard Lee) raise Fire to a white-hot intensity. Apparently doomed by an imminent explosion in the burning ship, Lemmon wants to live only to get revenge and Rita. The ship is abandoned as beyond redemption. So is Lemmon. He is left alone, staring at a knife, a bottle of brandy and a crucifix. Never allowed to slop over into obvious symbolism, the episode is made not only credible but spine-tingling.

The ending is unexpected, satisfying and far from standard. Sleepy-eyed Bob Mitchum never will wake up, but here his somnolence is quite effective. Rita, whose role is in the nature of a screen comeback after four years of sporadic squabbling with Columbia, and Jack Lemmon are both wide awake, turn in solidly realistic performances. Despite some purple dialogue ("You're driving me mad, authentically mad!") and its involuted continuity, Fire Down Below is a triangle story with unusual tensile strength.

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