The New Pictures

Not As a Stranger (Stanley Kramer; United Artists) is a film about doctors that runs for 135 minutes--a sort of Medic in flowing hospital gown. Based on Morton Thompson's bestselling novel, the film casts Robert Mitchum as the poor but insufferably high-principled hero who, nevertheless, is canny enough to marry a Swedish nurse (Olivia de Havilland) and use her nest egg to pay his tuition. So long as Stranger stays close to the subject of medicine, it gives off a crisp, documentary flavor in relating the macabre humors of medical students and touching on such taboos as the "quota" system in medical schools, pigheadedness among physicians and the nearly insurmountable handicaps faced by poverty-stricken students.

Finally graduating, Dr. Mitchum moves to a small town to practice, and again Producer-Director Stanley Kramer scores with a vivid sequence of the endless war between doctors and their reluctant patients. But now the sudsy vapors of soap opera cloud the film. Mitchum meets and at first nobly resists the town siren, played by Gloria Grahame in a manner suggesting that someone has paralyzed her upper lip with Novocain. Then one wild, blowy night they come together in a pasture back of the stables. While they gulp and stare at each other, a stallion batters furiously at its stall. In what must be the most thundering row of asterisks in Hollywood history, Mitchum releases the panting stallion, and--while it charges a mare in a soaring crescendo of music--Mitchum charges Gloria.

Stranger never recovers its balance after this hilarious episode. A typhoid epidemic, a botched operation by Mitchum, and his inevitable reconciliation with Olivia come as a succession of descending anticlimaxes. Charles Bickford gives a ruggedly stylish performance as a fatherly adviser, and Frank Sinatra, as Mitchum's roommate, adds wit to the student episodes. It is a better than adequate film, but that stud horse should have been kept quiet in its stall.

Land of the Pharaohs (Warner) is a CinemaScope extravaganza dedicated to the proposition that you can take it with you. Pharaoh Jack Hawkins, whose eagle-beaked visage bears a fleeting resemblance to Dick Tracy, employs his slaves and citizens to build a burglarproof pyramid that will hide him and his treasure until the end of time. But one of his wives, a Cyprian hellcat named Nellifer (Joan Collins), wants the pelf for herself, and intrigues and murders her way to the throne. The movie's theme, however, is that greed and grave-robbing never pay, so Nellifer gets her comeuppance by being buried alive with her dead master.

Filmed in Egypt, using up to 10,000 extras a day, the movie concentrates on erecting a pyramid from the ground up, thus giving CinemaScope something it has long needed: a large object nearly three times as wide as it is high. There are also eye-popping views of hordes of fellahin laboring in antlike masses along the serried ledges of stone quarries, and long lines of slaves hauling huge granite blocks across the burning sands. In fact, as a spectacle, the film has just about everything except Victor Mature--and not even Victor could have done much with the young hero's role (played by Dewey Martin), since most of the time he stands on the sidelines ineffectually wringing his hands.

The script is by a battery of writers headed by Nobel Prizewinner William Faulkner, but he is probably not responsible for the film's prize anachronistic line: when the high priest recoils from villainous Joan Collins, she snaps back in British accents with the devastating Bronx locution: "The feeling is mutual."

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