The New Pictures

The Unforgiven (Hecht-Hill-Lancaster; United Artists) is a massive and masterful attempt to gild the oat. The picture runs for two hours and seven minutes and cost $5,500,000, even though most of it was filmed in what Hollywood's cost accountants call the "budget badlands" of central Mexico. It presents two major stars (Burt Lancaster, Audrey Hepburn) and an outsize posse of featured players (Audie Murphy, Charles Bickford, Lillian Gish, John Saxon, Albert Salmi, June Walker, Joseph Wiseman). It was directed by John Huston, whose Treasure of the Sierra Madre is one of the best westerns ever made, and it was shot from a script by Ben (The Asphalt Jungle) Maddow that seizes a timely and heroic theme, the struggle between human feeling and race prejudice, and develops it in epic rhythms and with epic force.

The struggle is set in the dusty barrens of the Panhandle a few years after the Civil War. An old range-runner (Wiseman), mad with grief and battles, spreads a sinister story that a dark-skinned girl (Hepburn) adopted by the long-dead father of the rancher-hero (Lancaster) is really a "red-hide whelp," a papoose the father rescued from a massacre of Kiowas. The hero asks his mother (Gish) if the tale is true. He is shattered when she says it is. Nevertheless, even though he hates Indians as only a man can whose father has been killed by them, he defends the little "red Niggah" against the Kiowas, who fight to get her back; against the other ranchmen, who want to throw her as a sop to the raiding tribesmen; against his own brother (Murphy), whose love for his adopted sister is dissolved in hatred of her race; and even against herself, when she tries to go back to her people. Sexual love and physical violence somewhat confuse the racial issue, but the sex is interpreted with grace and dignity, and the violence with plenty of the old gee-whiz.

Director Huston is in fact at the top of his form as an entertainer in the grandstand manner. Unfortunately, he has tried to be more than an entertainer. The Unforgiven is designed and executed as a heroic poem, a sort of cow-country Cid. Its pace is slow and noble. Its frames are often stark tableaux. Its characters are simplified and enlarged into figures for a legend. But the legend, like most synthetic folklore, fails to come alive. How could it when the sod hut looks like a page from HOUSE & HOME, when the back-country heroine has an elocution-school accent, when the cowpunching hero has clean, executive hands? Mankind needs new and vital legends, and Director Huston should not be blamed for trying to make one. Only for trying to fake one.

Tall Story (Mansfield Productions; Warner), as a hit comedy (TIME, Feb. 9, 1959) written for Broadway by Howard Lindsay and Russel Grouse, was constructed on the principle of the basketball. A variety of vapid college humors were compressed into an airtight container of cynical wit laced up with some penetrating moral strictures. Joshua Logan, who produced and directed this film version of the play, has managed with singular skill to peel off the wit and the penetrating remarks. What is left is rather difficult to describe, but it sure doesn't have much bounce.

The hero (Tony Perkins) of the picture is a big man on a small West Coast campus, an All-America basketball player who falls into a slack-jawed dribble every time he sees the cheerleader (Jane Fonda) of his dreams. She spreads the net; he flips the question. But how can they get married without money? A gambler offers to supply the cash on the usual condition: throw the Big Game. Tony is led into temptation but delivered from evil just in time to save the day (81-80) for dear old Custer.

Nothing could possibly save the picture, not even the painfully personable Perkins doing his famous awkward act, not even a second-generation Fonda with a smile like her father's and legs like a chorus girl. The lines ("Beget--isn't that a sweet word for it?") are stupefyingly cute, the sight gags frantically unfunny, the climax about as exciting as a soggy sweat sock.

Please Don't Eat the Daisies (Euterpe; MGM) is a mildly amusing domestic comedy that purports to be based on the 1957 bestseller by Jean Kerr, playwright-wife of Walter Kerr, drama critic of the New York Herald Tribune.

Actually, since the book had about as much plot as a suburban train schedule, it has provided the picture with no more than its title, its principal characters and a couple of its better gags. The rest is Hollywood.

The hero (David Niven), like Author Kerr's husband, is a Broadway aislebird.

The heroine (Doris Day) is his wife, the mother of his four small sons, who believe that in every democratic family the majority rules. Also in the aislebird's nest: a fluttery nitwit of a mother-in-law (Spring Byington), a good-natured domestic slavey (Patsy Kelly), and a neurotic sheep dog that has to be given a tranquilizer whenever he sees a cat.

About halfway through the picture they all move to a falling-down mansion in the suburbs. When the painters take over, the critic temporarily moves back to Manhattan, where for a couple of reels he is hotly pursued by an actress (Janis Paige) who wants him to see an undress rehearsal of her favorite role. For a scene or two the marriage seems to be in trouble, but everything of course ends happily with the critic on the hearth. Typical dialogue, mother to son: "Stop kicking the table with your foot." "I'm not kicking; I'm tapping." "All right, stop tapping the table with your foot." "It isn't my foot; it's a fork." "Well, stop tapping with the fork." "It's just one of the kitchen forks." "Look, will you stop doing anything!" "You want me to stop eating?" Home from the Hill (Sol C. Siegel; M-G-M). Bang. And another Texan (Robert Mitchum) bites the dust, shotgunned down by a trigger-happy husband whose wife has been "grassed out," as they say down thataway. "Tell yuh the truth," Mitchum murmurs when he finds himself alive, "I don't rightly remember which one she was." Carried home by one of his illegitimate sons (George Peppard), he is met by the frozen sneer of a frigid wife (Eleanor Parker). "I could walk in here with my head under my arm," he announces bitterly, "and you wouldn't turn a hair." She shrugs. "If you'd stayed at home, this wouldn't have happened." He sneers. "I'd a-stayed at home if they was anything to stay at home fo'." The only thing the frigid wife cares about is her sissified son (George Hamilton), who has a little net and chases butterflies. Disgusted, Mitchum gives the boy a gun and teaches him to chase the wild boar. Mother sobs. "Yew said he was mahn if Ah stayed." Father snarls triumphantly, "Go join a garden club. He's mahn!" Soon the boy starts chasing two-footed game (Luana Patten), which he easily bags.

From there out, the plot begins to get so complicated that only an East Texas coon dog could possibly follow it--or be dumb enough to want to. But up to a point the picture, which is rather crudely adapted from a vigorous first novel by William Humphrey, has a certain low Faulknerian likability.

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