The New Pictures

The Kentuckian (Hecht-Lancaster; United Artists) strikes a note, pitched somewhere between a 59-c- moose call and a classic eclogue, that might suitably be called "Hollywood pastoral." It is raucous, but it has touches of poetry, too.

The year is 1820. A boy (Donald McDonald) and his father (Burt Lancaster) set their feet on the long way west from Kentucky to Texas. First town they come to, Paw gets himself in trouble with the sheriff and lands in the local stockade, but a bondslave (Dianne Foster), who has mysteriously acquired a henna rinse, sets him free. In gratitude, plainly mixed with motives that make better box office, Burt buys up her indenture with his "Texas money" and takes her along to fry his taters.

Next town they come to, Burt goes to work and soon has his money back in pocket. But by that time he has something else (Diana Lynn) in prospect, almost as hot as Texas and not nearly so flat. She's a schoolmarm, and she plays him mountain music on what sounds like a clavichord. Poor slavey--she's got more sex than teacher, but what good is sex, she asks herself ruefully, against a clavichord? Silly girl. The hero soon enough succumbs to manifest destiny.

The beauty of The Kentuckian is not in the raw yarn, but in the loving country touch with which it was homespun. The script, taken from The Gabriel Horn, a novel by Felix Holt, was put together by A. B. Guthrie Jr., who has published, in The Big Sky and The Way West, two excellent books on the winning of the West. By his skillful doing, the wheezy conventional apparatus of the Hollywood western--all the bang-bang and fistic shindy--is merged in the green world of quiet woods and early custom, like a shiny, store-bought backwoods still that has been tenderly overgrown by young birch and honeysuckle.

At one point, for instance, the hero leisurely lies his length in a lone copse and listens to the belling of his houn' dawg on the ridge. "Sweet music, ain't it, son?" he sighs. "Too purty for a body to stand, a'most," the boy agrees. Out of such moments, too, grows a sense of the attachment between father and son, and in the end, it is this relationship, and not the sappy love affairs, that is important.

The good script, moreover, has had good direction, and the credit goes to Actor Lancaster. In his first attempt to run a whole show, he demonstrates a refreshing preference for natural setting--many a western looks as if it was shot on the back lot of a drive-in barbecue--and a remarkably pretty wit. Furthermore, Lancaster directs himself with more sense for his own limits than most other directors have shown, and he gets an appealing, unaffected performance out of the boy who plays his son. But the best actor in the film, and no shame to his colleagues, is one called Faro. He is one of the rarest sights on any screen: just plain dog.

The African Lion (Disney; Buena Vista), the third of Walt Disney's full-length True-Life Adventures, does not sing a song of biology as stirringly as The Living Desert, but it is still one of the best movies ever made about Africa. With able use of the telephoto lens, along with plenty of patient scrounging around in the underbrush, Cameraman Alfred Milotte and his wife Elma have managed to sit the moviegoer a little nearer front and center than he has ever sat before at the greatest wild animal show on earth. The best bits:

P: Two young giraffes, in coltish mood, cross necks as men cross swords, and duel off their excess energy.

P: Hippopotamuses, quite as dumpy-dainty as Disney imagined them in his Fantasia ballet, glide and swoop and teeter-tiptoe underwater, looking like corpulent, flirtatious, middle-aged belles at a eurythmics seminar, except when they gap their incredible yaps, and let the fish swim in to pick their teeth.

P: A six-ton elephant heaves up a trunk as thick as a small tree, curls it back as delicately as a debutante's pinky, and with exquisite precision wipes a bit of foreign matter out of his eye.

Then there are the lions, but they aren't much, if the moviegoer can believe his eyes. A pride of lions is really just a snoring shame. They lie around on their backs half the day, with their legs in the air like great tawny tabbies, and the rest of the time they lie on their stomachs and lick themselves. Once in a while Mother Lion gets up and carries a cub somewhere in her mouth, or leads him along with his tail between her teeth, but she soon lies down again. Father Lion does not indulge in such violent exertions. The king of beasts reclines in raunchy grandeur, and hardly ever does anything more than raise his head to peer weakly through a cloud of flies at the antelope who pass disdainfully a few feet from where he lies, knowing that it is the queen who brings home most of the bacon. In fact, the only demonstrable hardship in a lion's life is the rainy season, during which the tropic plains sometimes lie sunk under six inches of water. The lion looks terribly unhappy about it, but he lies down anyway.

My Sister Eileen (Columbia) has a slightly tentative air about it, as if no one concerned ever quite believed the picture was going to be released. A musical remake of the 1942 movie (starring Rosalind Russell) that was, in turn, adapted from the 1940 Broadway play based on the humorous New Yorker stories by Ruth McKenney, the film must inevitably face comparison with Broadway's Wonderful Town, the hit musical (also starring Rosalind Russell) that derived from the same stories. The comparison is devastatingly in favor of Wonderful Town.

In the picture, Janet Leigh and Betty Garrett play the ambitious sisters from Ohio who invade Manhattan, settle in Greenwich Village and have assorted adventures with the local bohemians, the native wolves and a large part of the Brazilian navy. Janet is decorative, particularly when she romps artlessly about her basement apartment in scanties. but Comedienne Garrett's wit is more often brash than beguiling. In general, the film is callow where it should be young, and supported by dogged energy rather than a bubbling gaiety. In mid-film, Jack Lemmon adds some bracing laughter to the show with a slapstick attempted seduction of Betty Garrett. In this scene, it is as if someone put a jolt of fine brandy into a pot of Pablum. But once Lemmon is gone, Eileen grinds on with its predictable succession of songs and dances.

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