The New Pictures

Big Deal on Madonna Street (Cris-taldi-Lux; U.M.P.O.), made in Italy by a little-known director named Mario Monicelli, is a mildly shaggy, fracturingly funny lecture on a subject that nobody since Buster Keaton has really done justice to: How Not To Commit A Burglary.

The burglars in this instance are as amiable a bunch of cabbages as ever put their heads together. One (Renato Salvatori) is a successful baby-carriage thief. Another (Carlo Pisacane) is an old and toothless messenger boy. The third (Marcello Mastroianni) is a no-talent photographer, the fourth (Tiberio Murgia) a fiery Sicilian who thinks that everybody is trying to seduce his unmarried sister (Claudia Cardinale), the fifth (Vittorio Gassman) a preliminary bum who never hits anything but the canvas. Only the sixth (Toto), a renowned but senile safecracker, has any previous criminal experience, and when he sees the quality of his confederates, he pockets his consultant fee ($80) and backs inconspicuously out of the deal.

Stealthily, and above all "scientifically," the gang prepares to take its objective, a neighborhood jewelry store. The plan involves a vacant apartment through which the store can be entered. Mamma mia! A few days before the robbery the gang discovers that the apartment is not vacant at all. Two nice old ladies live there--they just never open the shutters. Fortunately, the old ladies have a pretty young housemaid. The boxer makes a date with her. She falls madly in love--and impulsively announces that she has quit her job. No! Yes.

The gang goes in through a coal chute. Unfortunately, the furnace has been converted to oil, and the first man lands in a tank of it. Somebody drops the burglar tools. Somebody else puts a foot through a skylight. Once inside the apartment--the old ladies are out of town for the weekend--the intruders delicately drill a hole in the wall that stands between them and the jeweler's safe. Spfluroosh! A jet of water jumps out of the wall--they managed to hit a pipe. And so on to the climax, which comes in one of the grandest and goofiest sight gags since Stan Laurel looked into a bathroom mirror, saw a gorilla, decided that he must need a shave.

The Magnificent Seven (United Artists) suggests that, after many a disappointment with Hollywood and television westerns, U.S. reviewers and distributors are so saddle-sore and range-blind that they cannot tell a ring-tailed snorter from a bucket-foot mule. Greeted by a flurry of inattention from the critics, this western has been hastily remaindered into the neighborhood circuits in the hope that it will soon get profitably lost in the Christmas rush. The loss will be bearable: Seven is not a great picture--not nearly as good as the Japanese Magnificent Seven (TIME, Dec. 10, 1956), the brilliant episode of chivalry, directed by Japan's Akira (Rashomon) Kurosawa, from which it is adapted. Nevertheless, it is the best western released so far in 1960, a skillful, exciting, and occasionally profound contemplation of the life of violence.

In the Hollywood version of the Kurosawa story, the seven samurai become seven Texas gunmen (Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Horst Buchholz, James Coburn, Charles Bronson, Robert Vaughn, Brad Dexter). One day. Bravo Brynner is approached by some Mexican farmers who offer him everything they have if he will protect their village from a bandit chieftain (Eli Wallach). Unexpectedly moved, he accepts their minuscule fee, recruits the other six, and together they ride out on their errand of mercy. Why? Not one of them is really sure until the bandit gang is wiped out and the three surviving gunmen say farewell. "You have won, we have lost," they say sadly, thinking of their dead companions. "Only the farmers have won," an old man agrees. "They remain forever. They are like the land. You are like the wind ... a strong wind [chasing] the locusts . . . blowing over the land and passing on. Vayan con Dios." Technically, the film is up to big-studio standards. Color, camera work, acting and direction (John Sturges) are competent. But the script (William Roberts) is what gives this western its special dimensions of inwardness and dignity. Expert but sensitive, the writer searches even more intimately than Kurosawa did into the nature of the fateful tie that, sometimes as pity, sometimes as cruelty, sometimes as love, always and inevitably binds the strong to the weak.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.