The New Pictures

The Sundowners (Warner) is what the Aussies would call a bonzer bit of borak, full of the old whacko.

Adapted by Isobel Lennart from a 1952 novel by Jon Cleary, the picture serves a slice of life in the "outback"--the vast sheep steppes of the Australian hinterland. The hero (Robert Mitchum) is a sundowner, the Aussie equivalent of a rolling stone, who drifts from bush town to bush town, job to job, while his wife (Deborah Kerr) urges him to save up, buy a farm and settle down. To keep peace, he takes a job as a "rouseabout" in a shearing shed. But as soon as he has some savings, he nicks off and goes broke in a game of two-up. So it's back to drifting, and though the life is rough as bags, the wife has to admit that she likes it.

Thanks mostly to Director Fred Zinnemann, the story goes knocking along like a southerly buster through some bloody-awful bush between Nimmitabel and Jindabyne. Mitchum and Kerr sometimes sound like Aussies-come-lately, but on the whole they manage the loose-elbowed looks and snarly charm of the permanent residents. Peter Ustinov, playing an unmarried remittance man who has to beat the girls off with a waddy, makes a comical old dag. But when it comes to stealing scenes, the actors often have to give way to the dingoes, the wombats, and especially to the endless flocks of sheep that drift across the screen like clouds with hooves. Sheep are also involved in the film's best sequence, a glorious piece of frontier humor in which Mitchum enters a shearing contest and takes a terrible licking from an 80-year-old man (Wylie Watson). Stone the crows if, on the whole, the show ain't square dinkum and everybody's cuppa.

Exodus (Preminger; United Artists) seems certain to become one of the most productive mints ever installed behind a marquee. Otto Preminger's much-flacked-about film version of Leon Uris' forest-felling novel--it lasted 80 weeks on the bestseller lists and moved almost 4,000,000 copies--has all the production values expected in an epic: full color, wide screen, 45,000 extras, ten name players (Paul Newman, Eva Marie Saint, Sir Ralph Richardson, Peter Lawford, Lee J. Cobb, Sal Mineo, John Derek, Hugh Griffith, Gregory Ratoff, Felix Aylmer). What's more, it got these advantages at a spectacularly reduced rate. Shot on the cheap in Israel and Cyprus, Exodus cost less than $4,000,000 to put in the can and has already racked up, at reserved-seat prices ($1.50-$3.50), a record advance sale: $1,600,000.

Happily, the public will get its money's worth. Greeted by Hollywood wise guys with vulgar hoots ("Preminger's matzo opera . . . the first Jewish western"), Exodus nevertheless turns out--despite its duration (four hours, including intermission) and an irritating tendency to Zionist tirade--to be a serious, expert, frightening and inspiring political thriller.

The story is tidily divided into three parts. Part One describes the 1947 "ingathering of the exiles" in a magnificent anecdote--the fiercely exciting dramatization of an episode in which some 600 Jewish internees escape from a British camp on Cyprus, board a rustbucket called Exodus in the harbor at Famagusta, throw all their food overboard and proclaim to the watching world that they will die of starvation or even blow up the ship unless the British let them sail for the promised land.

Part Two describes the reign of terror imposed on Palestine by the ultranationalist cults of violence (Irgun Zvai Leumi, Stern Gang), and culminates in a film version of the famous mass breakout of Acre prison that will be studied for years as a master's thesis on the cinema of escape.

Part Three describes the tragic aftermath of independence, the events that swiftly led up to civil war between Jews and Arabs. Then comes the one big structural defect of the production. Just as the war begins, the picture ends. Many moviegoers will feel cheated of a climax --but then they might feel even more upset if the picture went on for another four hours.

Taken as a whole, Exodus is a terrific show. Director Preminger (The Man with the Golden Arm, Anatomy of a Murder) is at the top of his form in every department. Cinematography and cutting are impeccable, and the actors are masterfully maneuvered. But the fundamental strength of the film derives from a script that, when due allowance is made for the slovenly (though heartfelt) book on which it is based, seems an amazing achievement: clear, intelligent, subtle, witty, swift, strong, eloquent. Ironically, the script is bringing Hollywood embarrassment as well as riches. It is the work of a well-known, long jobless member of the Fifth Amendment fringe named Dalton Trumbo, who was also responsible for the brilliant scenario of Spartacus (TIME, Oct. 24).

With all its various vitalities, the script perpetuates the more serious defects of the novel, and these are not technical but moral defects. The film is pro-Semitic. Well and good; it is good for the soul, whether Jewish or Christian, to be reminded that the Jewish culture and community have survived 2,000 years and more of persecution not only because many Jews are brilliant but also because many are brave. But even though competent historians, in determining who started the civil war, refuse to excuse either side, the film unequivocally blames the Arabs, absolutely absolves the Jews. Then, in chauvinistic frenzy, the picture goes on to sanctify the Jewish terror. Among the principal heroes: a saintly old assassin (David Opatoshu) attached somehow to a Coptic synagogue, a psychotic youth (Mineo) apparently restored to sanity by a regimen of mass murder. The kind of blind hatred that excuses the Jewish terror was also used to excuse the Nazi extermination camps.

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