The New Pictures
Heller in Pink Tights (Ponti-Girosi; Paramount) is a western in which Sophia Loren portrays an actress. Otherwise the picture is reasonably believable. It tells the story of a smalltime theatrical troupe that played the road while it was still a buffalo track between the gold and eattle towns of the Wild West. Actress Loren is the leading lady of the company, but she is actually no lady. When she runs out of money in a poker game, she pledges her fair white body and promptly loses to a gunslinger (Steve Forrest). But sure enough, when the badman tries to cash in his chippy, she proves to have an ace (Anthony Quinn) up her sleeve.
Director George (Les Girls) Cukor is not so lucky. His Italian producers--one of them, Carlo Ponti, is Actress Loren's husband--seem to feel about as much at home on the range as would a gopher in a ton of spaghetti. After just one nervous glimpse of the wide-open spaces of southern Arizona, they hastily trundle the camera into an obscenely overcolored set that looks like a better-class Roman brothel. Now and then, Scriptwriters Dudley Nichols and Walter Bernstein strike theatrical sparks. But most of their jokes are period pieces, and most of the scene-writing is strictly forloren.
Mysteries of the Deep (Walt Disney; Buena Vista), one of the best of Disney's nature films, takes the audience for a brisk, 24-minute skindive in the blue and teeming waters of the Bahama Islands. Shot for the most part by Harry and Verne Pederson, two of Disney's ablest underwater agents, the picture may startle even the moviegoer who has seen this sort of thing before. Its colors are unusually subtle in their brilliance, as if the camera were watching a mysterious subaqueous conflagration. And the usual catalogue of natural curiosities contains some especially photogenic entries. Items: P: The Spanish shawl, a sea slug that looks like a rose-and-purple potato chip, and flies through the water like a soggy butterfly. P: A shoal of squid that zoom through the pale depths like a formation flight of bloated stomachs. P:The barbershop shrimp, a sort of animated toothpick that prowls around inside the mouths of well-fed fish and cleans up the leftovers. P:The pecten, a jet-propelled mollusk that dances around the sea floor clacking itself hysterically, like a handless Castanet.