The New Pictures

Albert Schweitzer (Hill-Anderson), filmed mostly in Africa by Erica Anderson under appalling technical difficulties, is a beautifully photographed, badly colored, thoroughly interesting biography of a gifted, practical humanitarian.

The great experience of Schweitzer's youth, as he says in the commentary he wrote for the film, was that of suffering. As the son of a Protestant preacher in Alsace, he was rejected by the other boys in his village as a highborn brat, and the rejection made him, he says, almost morbidly sensitive to the sufferings of others. Although in his 20s he became famous as organist, philosopher, theologian, he never stopped wondering what he could do to ease the world's pain. At 30, he abandoned fame, plunged into medicine, determined to spend his life as a missionary doctor in French Equatorial Africa. "Man belongs to man," he wrote. "Man has claims on man . . . One who escapes misfortune should render thanks by doing something to relieve suffering."

The rest of the picture is a fairly candid camera record of how Schweitzer today, half a century after he made the central decision of his life, is still paying humanity's claim. His hospital at Lambarene, two days up the Ogowe River, is a rough compound of iron-roofed wooden shacks in a jungle clearing. Schweitzer and his small staff--three doctors, nine nurses --work with comparatively crude instruments (complicated medical gadgets invariably break down in the jungle climate). They have modern drugs, but they do not despise the native alexins. Says Schweitzer: "I have not wanted to introduce these simple people to techniques and tools upon which they might learn to depend, and which would be unavailable to them [in] their own communities."

The film conveys a strong impression that Schweitzer is a forceful personality in whom will and energy are more apparent than saintliness. He is gruff but grandfatherly with his native patients, appears relieved when he can spend a couple of hours at his manuscripts or, best of all, in the company of his prize possession: a heat-resistant, termite-repellent piano. Schweitzer has said that he did not go to Africa to civilize but to atone.

Three Brave Men (20th Century-Fox) is based on the famous Chasanow case (TIME, May 10, 1954 et seq.), which in one fell scandal discredited the Navy's existing security program. But are bumbling bureaucrats the villains of the piece? Not at all. "This," the studio declares with unblinking self-gratulation, "is the story the Navy wanted told ... of the lengths to which [governmental] agencies will go to safeguard the sacred rights of individuals ... of an Assistant Secretary of the Navy who has the moral courage to discover and publicly admit his mistake."

When the moviemakers are through polishing up the brass, they tell the story of Bernie Goldsmith (Ernest Borgnine)--which is substantially that of Abraham Chasanow. After 22 years of governmental service. Goldsmith is abruptly suspended as a security risk. When the whispering campaign gets going, he is shunned by his neighbors as a Communist, but his friends rally round and. as a studio release somewhat mysteriously explains, "risk public approbation to defend his name." When his lawyer (Ray Milland) wins a hearing several months later, Goldsmith wins a recommendation for reinstatement. Ruling overruled.

Goldsmith and his friends stage public indignation meetings, force the Navy (Dean Jagger) to reinvestigate the case. The second look reveals that all the information lodged against Goldsmith was obtained from his personal enemies or from well-known cranks (the studio, boldly risking public approbation, calls them "overzealous patriots"). In the end Goldsmith, like Chasanow, wins back his job, along with full back pay. Whereupon the moviemakers timidly but firmly point the obvious moral: in time of ideological war, when it is perhaps essential for the populace to be armed with intellectual weapons, there are bound to be some casualties. There might be fewer if people would learn to distinguish between responsible sentries and vengeful snipers, between democracy's careful sergeants and its trigger-happy fools.

Slander (MGM) takes a candid peep into the keyhole press, which in recent years has made a multimillion-dollar business out of character assassination. On the face of it, the picture is just Hollywood's way of swatting one of its more irritating fleas: most of the people who have been smeared by the scandal magazines are movie stars. But in a deeper sense the moviemakers have served the public too. For in the pursuit of the principal villain they also take a swipe or two at his accomplices--at the readership which settles in cloudlike millions on the garbage which the scandal sheets provide.

"Ye shall know the truth" is the pious text to which Real Truth magazine cynically subscribes in its impious operations, "and the truth shall make you free." The kind of truth that Real Truth publishes has made its publisher (Steve Cochran) free of financial worries. Once a nickel-and-dime pressagent for a string of strippers, he can now afford to have the Rolls brought round to a Park Avenue address. But then all at once circulation, and with it Cochran's elegant new world, begins to crumble. "What we need," he storms at his harried staff, "is a really big piece of dirt."

To get it, Scandalmonger Cochran turns to blackmail. He puts the bite on a smalltime puppeteer (Van Johnson) who knows something scandalous about a big-time actress. Spill it, says Cochran, or I'll spill what I know about you--a four-year prison term for armed (with a knife) assault and robbery. Johnson goes into an almighty pucker, all the tighter because, at the moment the threat is made, he has just made a hit with a television show of his own; all the more painful because his wife (Ann Blyth) finds it easier to abandon her sense of humanity than the hope of Connecticut. "I could not love you, dear, so well." she seems to say, "loved I not honor less''--and the shocking thing about the situation is that her attitude is presented as the normal, natural way for a woman to feel.

For all that, the hero stands firm, and the villain gets his comeuppance in a flourish of gunfire that echoes some loud reports heard in the scandal magazine business last fall. At the fade, moviegoers may want to stand up and cheer for the film's honorable intentions, but some may also squirm at its probable effect on a kind of business in which every knock may be a circulation boost.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.