The New Pictures

The River (Oriental-International; United Artists] is a thoroughly unconventional movie and a very good one. It rises out of Rumer Godden's autobiographical novel (1946) about an English girl growing up beside a holy river in India. Directed by France's Jean (Grand Illusion) Renoir, who wrote the script with Novelist Godden, and produced entirely in India by a Hollywood florist named Kenneth McEldowney, it is a sensitive, Technicolored record of youthful growing pains, enriched by a poetic perspective of life and a wealth of Indian sights & sounds.

One measure of the film's quality is the way it rises above its own cinematic faults. The River is designed more like a novel than a movie. A narrator introduces the characters in turn, explains their backgrounds and personalities. For almost half the film's length, the actors exchange only snatches of dialogue that jut abruptly into the narration. Both camera and narrator are always veering off to scenes of native customs, which, however beautifully composed, further slow down an already leisurely story. Yet The River gradually unfolds a mood-filled pattern that holds all the strands in place.

The main strand belongs to Harriet (Patricia Walters), the eldest daughter of a jute-mill manager, living in a big house on the riverside. Budding as a poet as well as an adolescent, she is thin-skinned and imaginative, "an ugly duckling desperately trying to be a swan." The arrival of a young American (Thomas E. Breen) next door, brooding over his loss of a leg in the war, sets off the events that teach Harriet the sweet ache of first love, the terrible finality of death, the never-ending renewal of life.

'Harriet's rich, pretty neighbor Valerie

(Adrienne Corri) is also drawn to the American, expresses her adolescent awakening in willful cruelty to those around her. Another friend, also smitten, is Melanie (Radha), a solemn, big-eyed Anglo-Indian who is painfully uncertain whether she belongs to India or the West. Meanwhile, the American is struggling stubbornly to convince himself that his missing leg makes him no different from anyone else.

In varying degrees, these characters all come to terms with life, and into balance with themselves, through a subtle mingling of their experience and the symbolic lesson of their surroundings: the serene, endless flow of the river, the patient, ageless ways of the people in the boats, the bazaars and the temples.

If, within its artful unity of theme and mood, The River has its trying moments, the film also offers some exceptionally rewarding ones--ranging from the stylized interlude of an ancient Indian fable, with Radha as its gracefully dancing heroine, to a brief, charming scene in which a kite cavorts crazily in a bright blue sky to the perfectly timed accompaniment of a native drum and pipe.

The Medium (Walter Lowendahl) is the most skillful and imaginative effort so far to bridge the gap between movies and opera, but it still leaves the gap wide open. Shooting in Rome to gain atmosphere and save money, Composer-Librettist Gian-Carlo Menotti has preserved the musical values of his successful short opera while turning it into a curious mixture of sometimes effective, sometimes static cinema sequences.

The movie, like the twice-revived, widely toured Broadway version of 1947, is the Grand-Guignol story of a cruel, shabby fraud of a clairvoyant (Marie Powers) who comes to believe in the supernatural herself. In her conscience-stricken fear of the unknown, she unwittingly kills her mute assistant (Leo Coleman).

As on the stage, The Medium is played with uncommon credibility for opera, and is well sung by Contralto Powers, young (15) Soprano Anna Maria Alberghetti as her daughter-accomplice, and Donald Morgan, Belva Kibler and Beverly Dame as the all-too-willing victims of her chicanery. Settings and photography hold the film in just the right macabre mood.

Yet even Menotti's flexible use of the camera cannot overcome a major handicap: in scene after scene, the movie makes its dramatic point, then marks time until the singing catches up with the story. Partly to liberate the action from the opera's single indoor set, partly to stretch the work to feature length, Menotti adds some new material, but his story is too simple and its mood too intense to be sustained effectively beyond the time he allotted for it on the stage. The film also suffers when its words become unintelligible in some of the singers' trilling upper range.

The Medium is a good try, promising enough to nominate Director Menotti and Associate Director Alexander Hammid as the men most likely to succeed in future efforts for a successful merger of opera and the screen. They might have better luck if Menotti wrote an opera directly for the movies instead of trying, however ingeniously, to work at second hand.

Hotel Sahara (J. Arthur Rank), the tale of an African desert oasis successively invaded by Italians, British, Nazis and Free French, adds a pleasantly nonbelligerent footnote to World War II. As a

Levantine hotel-owner, not mad at anybody, Peter Ustinov is kept busy running up the appropriate flags and protecting his romantic interest in Yvonne de Carlo. The embattled armies are amiably caricatured, with top honors going to David Tomlinson, as an earnest but fumbling Briton; Guido Lorraine, as a guitar-strumming Italian officer; and Albert Lieven, who brings an effective blend of beery sentiment and deadly efficiency to his portrait of an Afrika Korps lieutenant. Yvonne de Carlo displays a surprising comedy touch as she cheers up the various warriors by appearing, in turn, as a flashing signorina, a tweedy English girl, a no-nonsense fraulein in braids, and a racy cocotte.

Jim Thorpe--All American (Warner) deals with that remote period in U.S. history when a mere hint of commercialism could cost an athlete his amateur standing. As the great Indian champion, Burt Lancaster is muscularly convincing, both in his gridiron triumphs at Carlisle and his 1912 Olympic victories in Sweden. But after the hero is stripped of his trophies, because he has played a summer of semi-pro baseball, the film loses headway and seems unable to decide whether Thorpe was unstable by nature or embittered by circumstances.

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