The New Pictures

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (MGM) is a lighthearted musical version of The Rape of the Sabine Women. It is also the liltingest bit of tunesome lollygagging to hit the screen since the same studio brought forth An American in Paris (1951).

The movie Rape, fairly mild compared to Plutarch's version, is based on a short story by Stephen Vincent Benet. Accordingly, the deed is done in Oregon's backwoods rather than in Rome's front yard--and in truth it is not even done.

The seven brothers of the title are the seven redheaded Pontipee boys--Adam, Benjamin, Caleb, Daniel, Ephraim, Frank and Gideon--who live all alone in their potato patch and wish they didn't. When Adam (Howard Keel), the eldest, gets himself a wife (Jane Powell) by singing one of those rare ballads (When You're in Love) with love in the music as well as in the words, the other brothers celebrate their single cussedness by yowling a funeral Lament (for a lonesome polecat) that should fracture even the toughest audience.

It just breaks big brother's heart, anyway, to hear them carry on so. But what's to do? He grubs in Plutarch's Lives--one of the two books in the house, in which his wife has been teaching him to read--for a helpful hint, and finds the story of the Sabine women.

In the dead of a bright white winter's night, the hot young sparks fly off to town to steal some girls of tinder age. Six screams later, their sleigh is racing back to the farm with a baggage of "Sobbin' Women" aboard and a tumult of raging fathers behind. The brothers shout down an avalanche of snow behind them, blocking pursuit until spring, and barrel away home to a long winter's courtship.

The whole picture is a happy surprise. The songs (words by Johnny Mercer, music by Gene de Paul) are fresh; the dances (staged by Michael Kidd) are wonderfully prancy; the screenplay (by Albert Hackett, Frances Goodrich and Dorothy Kingsley) is fairly funny without taking itself too seriously. Stanley Donen (Singin' in the Rain) does a fine kind of under-direction that leaves the picture looking as though it just happened. Even the Ansco color often tastefully fits the mood of the wide-screen scene.

With all this to live up to, the players live it up with a will. Howard Keel has never sung better, and Jane Powell is a properly pretty operetta type. But the chorus line is the real star of the show: the six brothers and their six brides-to-be.

Having twelve handsome young people all athletically in love at once is a little like staging a mixed tandem-wrestle, and the audience works up almost as ruddy a glow as the participants.

The Unconquered (Albert Margolies).

"Can you see a world?", an interviewer once asked Helen Keller. "If you can, what is it like?" "Yes, yes, yes," Helen Keller said. "I can see, and that is why I can be so happy in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a man-made world." The golden night of Helen Keller will probably in the long run outshine the limelight she has lived in. Like the "golden flower" of the Chinese contemplatives, her experience has been a redoubtable witness to a doubting age that when other helpers fail and comforts flee, the help of the helpless abides. The Unconquered, her technically awkward but moving film biography, therefore quite suitably presents itself as a sort of modest footnote to The Lives of the Saints.

The picture tells simply--with the help of yellowed snapshots, newsreel footage and the narrative voice of Katharine Cornell--the well-known story of how at the age of 19 months Helen lost sight and hearing from a childhood illness. At the age of seven she "began to live" when Anne Mansfield Sullivan, a trained teacher of the deaf and blind, came to work with her.

Helen learned so prodigiously well that within three years, at the age of ten, she was corresponding vigorously with Phillips Brooks, the Episcopalian divine. Also at ten, she published a short story in the St. Nicholas magazine. Before long she was reading and writing fluently in five languages, and at 24 she was graduated cum laude from Radcliffe College.

Soon after, she published a book of poetry that showed a feeling ear for the English she could not hear, and then set forth on the first of the long lecture tours--speaking in a sort of strangled soprano, which is the closest she can come to intelligible English, with Teacher Sullivan translating--that were to make her name a household word.

Fame carried her to Hollywood in 1919, and here the sober script calls a thoroughly slap-happy recess to watch a flag-waving Helen, as the star of the film Deliverance (supposedly based on her life story), lead the charge of a revolutionary rabble across something that looks suspiciously like Concord Bridge.

And so it goes: on from her salad days in vaudeville, through the incessant confrontations with celebrity ("She made Calvin Coolidge smile"), the endless charity appearances, and the amiable little extraversions (she once gratified an impulse "to feel a lion," reported that "he was very handsome"). In the end the audience sees her in the yellow leaf of her eighth decade, as she lives and works now with her second companion, Polly Thompson, in their Connecticut home--drying dishes, following her guide rail for a walk in the fields, choring through the morning mail, touching music in a radio, caught reading a volume in Braille beneath the bedclothes late at night.

The impression that remains is not one of a life of worldly scurry, of an almost brutally strong retort to adversity. What hangs in the mind is the image of a clear old face out of a legend, of features that breathe a little of the quiet glory of the last lines of King Lear:

The oldest hath borne most: we who are

young, Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

The High and the Mighty (Wayne-Fellows; Warner) is about the worst piece of advertising the airlines have had since the crash that killed Carole Lombard. For that matter it is not much of an ad for the movies either.

The plot is a flight log between Honolulu and San Francisco. On the way, the plane half drops an engine, the navigator blows his calculations, the pilot (Robert Stack) funks out, the copilot (John Wayne) broods about a wife long years dead, the stewardess almost comes down with the meemies, and a known maniac is allowed to roam at large among the passengers.

The real trouble, however, is that a wild man is also on the loose behind the scenes. "Wild Bill" Wellman, the gifted director of such films as Nothing Sacred and The Ox-Bow Incident, went too wild on this one. His plot is a see-'em-squirm ploy that was old when Damocles came to dinner. His actors' sit as awkwardly on their narrow stage as prizewinners at a commencement exercise, and when they come to recite, say the same sort of silly things about "life." Worst of all are the flashbacks that come almost as thick as the ideational air pockets in this Hollywood brainstorm.

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