The New Pictures

A Hatful of Rain (20th Century-Fox), the latest of Hollywood's dope operas, is much the best of the hopheaded lot. Its predecessors luridly flaunted syringes, outsize needles and puncture-mottled golden arms; their heroes inevitably kicked the habit for good in a rosy last-reel vision of a better tomorrow.

Rain scraps this brand of opiated logic in favor of cold-turkey realism. The movie zeroes in on a nightmare that is real in tens of thousands of U.S. homes. This particular private hell is an apartment in a big Manhattan housing project. Don Murray is a jobless Korean veteran who, through some mischance of war, becomes addicted to morphine while under treatment in an Army hospital. Unaware that he is hooked, his pregnant wife (Eva Marie Saint) cannot fathom his jagged nerves, his remoteness, his all-night disappearances. Neither can his obtuse bartender father (Lloyd Nolan). But Murray's indulgent brother (Anthony Franciosa). a bouncer in a B-girl bar, understands too well; on Don's perennial promise of "quitting tomorrow.'' Tony has foolishly shot his savings keeping the lad aloft.

The film's strength is its refusal to melodramatize a situation whose inherent horror needs no melodrama. There is enough prosaic terror as Don, with slow, agonized self-abasement, reveals the nature of his sickness to his wife and father. A tour of an opium den could not carry the powerful conviction of this view into an ordinary living room.

Adapted from Michael Gazzo's hit play, the film is compassionately directed by Fred Zinnemann. As a courageous woman preferring the truth, no matter how grim, to uncertainty, no matter how disguised, Eva Marie has her best role since her Oscar-winning role in On the Waterfront. Addict Murray conquers with restraint--a happy departure from the screaming-meemie interpretation so often accorded the junky's part. To the end, Rain is true to its unflinching credo. The odds seem to be against the emancipation of an addict with one relapse already on his record. Rain abates with only the faintest hope of sunshine, hints that the long-range forecast is more rain.

An Affair to Remember (20th Century-Fox) drags Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr over as bumpy a road to love as Hollywood has ever contrived. Deborah is an elegantly kept (by Richard Denning) lady with a Park Avenue lust nest; Cary is a charm-laden bachelor on the verge of merging with America's heiress with the mostest (Neva Patterson). From the moment they meet on a transatlantic liner, this cynical, money-grabbing pair feel an overwhelming compulsion to give up their comfortable arrangements for a tumble into each other's arms.

Director and Co-Writer Leo McCarey told this tremulous tale once before in 1939 (Charles Boyer v. Irene Dunne). On this familiar old heart-wrenching ground, Cinemanipulator McCarey, whose heart is as big as a whale's, carefully swings the plot pendulum-like between gladness and sadness. Cary and Deborah agree to rid themselves of their previous encumbrances, make a date to meet again after six months devoted to finding themselves (she was once a singer; he painted). But on the day of their reunion, a screech of brakes is heard offscreen, and next thing Deborah is a cripple, maybe for the rest of her life. Unless she can recover completely, Cary must never know what became of her. She disappears into a settlement house to devote her shattered life to teaching music to underprivileged children. Even those who adore youngsters blindly may wince at the subsequent digression into a joyous interracial sea of gap-toothed, freckled faces, cutely squalling songs off-key--the sort of kiddies' night program that could break up a P.T.A. meeting. When Cary and Deborah at last clinch again on Christmas Day, it is a miracle that the juvenile choir does not burst in shrieking Away in a Manger.

Only sensitive acting by Deborah and Cary saves this saccharine trifle from suffocating in its sentimental wrappings. Affair would be much more easily remembered if it minded its own affair, let the goo go.

Band of Angels (Warner) is an epic that tries to convert the U.S. Civil War into a battle of the sexes. It is no better, no worse than Robert Penn Warren's best-selling novel (TIME. Aug. 22, 1955) in which the ante-bellum and wartime agonies of the South were portrayed as if the whole upheaval were a kind of apoplectic seizure under the magnolias.

Take Yvonne De Carlo--a feat that is simplicity itself according to the script. Raised as a white belle amidst Kentucky's bluegrass, she learns that her mamma was a Negro, and she is hauled off to be knocked down for $5,000 at a New Orleans slave auction. Her gallant buyer: an aging Rhett Butler, again played by Clark Gable (under the assumed name of Hamish Bond).

Gable was a Yankee sea captain in the "nigger business." but has now repented of his slave-trading ways, and settled down as a Spanish-mossbacked Southern gentleman whose vassals are so happy that they all mass by ol' man river to sing hallelujah whenever Gable's steamboat comes round the bend. Yvonne is also cooing Gable's glory, though in more intimate circumstances. The trouble comes from Sidney Poitier, a pampered boss Negro whom Gable raised as a son; Sidney has turned bitter, would like nothing better than to plant kindly Massa Clark in the col', col' groun'. In the fury of his ingratitude, he is obliged to cuff Mulatto De Carlo for flouncing around like uppity white trash, even trains an unsteady revolver on Massa Clark himself.

The ethereal unlikelihood of Band of Angels is heightened by its lunar dialogue. A pixilated slave woman shrills: "Sodjahs acomin' down fum de Nohf, sodjahs atotin' freedumb, adrippin' it lahk sweyet on a hot day!'' She also gives Yvonne some hot-day advice on how to enslave Gable: "Tease him lahk a cayetfish aswimmin' 'roun' a wuhm! Yukky-yuk! Wait'll he git itchy."

Serious War Between the States buffs will be offended and amused by turns to see the Uncle Tom flights through miasmic swamps, the merry occupation of gay New Orleans, racial tensions that erupt in trained choruses wailing old spirituals. Director Raoul Walsh, indifferent to his actors' scenery-chewing most of the time, cheerfully lets history take the hindmost.

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