The New Pictures

Wild Is the Wind (Hal Wallis; Paramount) makes a reasonably honest, week-end farmer's effort to turn the warm loam of natural life. Director George Cukor, though obviously a city feller, has managed to provide himself, for the occasion, with a conspicuously green thumb. Producer Hal Wallis has provided the movie with Italy's Anna Magnani, an actress as earthy (and sometimes as mysteriously beautiful) as a potato; with Anthony Quinn, an actor so radically natural that not even 20 years of Hollywood has spoiled him; and with a screenplay by Arnold Schulman that veers with the story's gusts of emotion as lightly as a weathercock in the wind.

Schulman tells the tale of a Nevada sheep rancher (Quinn), a rough, good-hearted Italian immigrant whose wife has died, and who goes back to Italy to fetch her sister (Magnani) to bed and board. The new wife soon finds out that he is still in love with the old, that he does not want her to be herself, but only to be "like Rosanna." Impossible. Rosanna was a yes woman; Gioia is one of those passionate natures that take time by the forelock and life by the throat. "You look like a slob!" her husband roars. "Why don' you be like Rosanna?" And Gioia tells him fiercely: "She was her. I'm me."

Things come to a head at a party. Falling down drunk, the husband tries to make up to Gioia by proposing a toast which he begins with a disastrous slip of the tongue: "To my wife Rosanna!" Gioia locks him out of their room. "Go sleep with the dead!" she rages. He takes a trip. Desperate to be loved, and loved for what she is, she gives herself to her husband's adopted son (Anthony Franciosa).

It is evident--from what is easily the strongest moment in the film--that the moviemakers regard a passionate adultery as a minor offense, compared to a loveless marriage. In the latter case, the offense is against nature, and nature is the standard in this picture.

Sayonara (Warner) is a modern version of Madame Butterfly which has gained in social significance but lost its wings--Puccini's music.

The significance is embedded in a passionate plea on behalf of miscegenation. Based on James Michener's bestselling switch on John Luther Long's love story, the picture tells the tale of Major Lloyd Gruver (Marlon Brando), an ace of the Korean war known as "the Air Force's pinup boy," and a Japanese pinup girl named Hana-ogi (Miiko Taka), the star of the Matsubayashi vaudeville troupe.

Brando is supposed to be a Southerner--though his accent sounds as if it was strained through Stanislavsky's mustache. When he first meets Hana-ogi, he believes that "fraternization is a disgrace to the uniform." But he has to admit that she is "a fahn-lookin' woman," and the color line soon becomes as vague in his mind as the meridian of Greenwich. "I will love you, Gruver-san," she murmurs to him one day, "if that is what you desire." That is what he desires, all right, and after much too much Brandoperatic declamation about "what mah reason fuh livin' is," he decides that he also desires to marry her.

To his consternation she refuses: "I have dedicated my life to my art." Having already seen the overdressed girlie show she works in, a Western viewer may be somewhat confused by her attitude. But Brando has to pretend to take the situation seriously, and it plainly bores him. He has some fun now and then monkey-see-monkey-doing like the Japanese, but he seems to find it unsatisfying to have to scratch himself through a kimono.

Ordet (Palladium; Kingsley International) is that rarest of delights for the fastidious eye, a film by Carl Dreyer. Dreyer, 68, is a Dane who has made his living as a newsman and his reputation as a cinematic creator on the strength of a half-dozen pictures that few people have seen. Only two have been generally noticed in the U.S. The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) was considered by most critics "an experimental film," but it has since served serious moviemakers as an invaluable primer on the uses of the closeup. Day of Wrath (1948) was a tenebrous expatiation on the theme of Jeremiah ("The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked"), and it roused Broadway critics to such a passion of love-hate that it ran for 13 weeks at a Manhattan art theater.

Ordet (The Word) is another religious film of the same midnight-sunny Scandinavian sort. Based on a play of the same title by Kaj Munk, the Danish pastor and playwright who was murdered, probably on Gestapo orders, in 1944, the picture does not tell a story so much as it poses an allegory. A village divided by religious faction into "life-affirming" and "death-seeking" sects is intended to signify what is rotten in the state of Denmark's soul, and in the world's as well. Because of this tragic split, the true faith--symbolized by a pathetic lunatic who imagines that he is the Christ of the Second Coming--wanders in alienation; and because there is no real religion, the world's soul--symbolized by a pregnant woman--dies in giving birth to a dead future. In the end a child's faith works a miracle, restoring religion, and through the power of religion restoring the soul to life.

The story is told with the luminous sincerity that haloes most of what Dreyer does. He has a deeper sympathy with the burgher virtues, a higher sense of the prosperous interior than almost any artist since the Flemish Renaissance; his frames impart the spiritual light of common things. And he can paint for the ear as well as for the eye; when suddenly the sound track fills with singing birds and a music of axles, bright September blows into the theater, tingling in the thoughts like merry harvest weather. Director Dreyer loves the human face ("A land one can never tire of exploring"), and he has chosen his faces with a sure insight. Best of all, perhaps, are the faces of the pregnant woman (Birgitte Federspiel) and her husband (Emil Haas Christensen), which make a simple, touching revelation: that they are deeply and quietly and naturally in love.

Unfortunately, Dreyer's defects are almost as spectacular as his virtues. If he is passionately true to himself, he can also be childishly subjective: his conception of the Christ (Preben Lerdorff Rye), for instance, is simply silly. And at times he is pointlessly rude to his audience. It is all very well to make a scene move slowly when the slowness adds to the weight and seriousness of the situation. But there is no good esthetic reason why every scene, regardless of content, should move at the doleful, two-beat trudge of a funeral march.

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