The New Pictures

Green Fire (MGM) spreads caviar on hardtack--which hardly improves the hardtack, and pretty well spoils the caviar. Grace Kelly is the delicacy in question, and what she is wasted on here is an ordinary Grade B jungle bungle. In Green Fire, as in Mogambo, the only other picture she has made at Metro, Grace is caviar to the crocodiles. A coffee heiress, she lives on a South American mocha finca. The nearest eligible male is weeks away. Hold on though, here comes Stewart Granger up the river, looking almost as hungry as she does. He is not hungry for love, however, but for money. That mountain over there, he tells Grace, is full of it. Emeralds! He digs and digs; she sighs and sighs. Nobody (including the moviegoer) gets anywhere, in fact, until ten minutes before the end of the picture.

Then all at once 1) a flood hits the plantation. 2) the bandits attack the mine, 3) a box of dynamite blows them all to guacamole, 4) an avalanche deflects the course of the river, 5) a tropical storm breaks, and 6) a rainbow shines through it, arching over 7) the Final Clinch.

Vera Cruz (Hecht-Lancaster; United Artists), billed as "The Battle of the Giants," is apparently an attempt to decide the heavyweight championship of Hollywood. In one corner stands Burt Lancaster, congenital desperado, and in the other Gary Cooper, Southern gentle man dispossessed by the Civil War. The rough stuff gets under way somewhere south of the border, around 1866. Bullets squeal, gun butts crunch, death screams gurgle, bombs go bam! And when a man is all tuckered out, some senorita is like as not to come slinking up with a rose in her teeth and a pigsticker in her rebozo. Actor Lancaster (a co-producer of the movie) is the virtuoso in this symphony of slam. He slugs his women and plugs his men with a beatific smile. Actor Cooper, as usual, looks as if he hates to shoot anybody, but it's amazing how often he has to ("He likes people," as Lancaster sums up, "and you can never count on a man like that").

The heroes shoot it out in the last scene, needless to say, and one of them walks away through so many corpses that it suddenly becomes clear why the producers had to develop an abnormally large screen (called SuperScope) for this picture.

The Silver Chalice (Warner) is made from Thomas B. Costain's bestselling nov el about a small group of dedicated Christians who sought to create a symbol out of the cup used at the Last Supper. Like so many other movies about the birth of Christianity, this film has a hard struggle trying to dramatize religion. Faith is depicted as a kind of chance commodity: some have it, some haven't--and the have-nots can get it merely by leafing through the scenario to the proper page.

Racing through the script are Jack Palance as Simon, a power-mad, eye-rolling (but strictly second-rate) magician who tries to discredit the growing body of Christians with rabble-rousing and tricks; Paul Newman as Basil, a pagan silversmith who designs a frame for the cup; Virginia Mayo, the sorcerer's apprentice, who divides her time between dressing up the boss's act and running up Basil's metabolism; and Pier Angeli, a wistful, loving Christian who finally wins Basil for herself.

Against a series of lavishly simple CinemaScope backgrounds, composed mostly of semiabstract arches, columns and walls and WarnerColored in pale hues, Director Victor Saville has set mob scenes, desert fights, courtroom trials and voluptuous goings-on in Nero's palace. For if Hollywood struggles unsuccessfully with a religious theme, it usually knows how to make hedonism come to life.

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