The New Pictures

The Miller's Beautiful Wife (Ponti-De Laurentiis; DCA), based on The Three-Cornered Hat, the well-known Spanish comedy of confusion by Pedro Antonio de Alarcon, offers somewhat more confusion and rather less comedy than the novel. But the comedy is always pleasant, and the confusion, as Director Mario Camerini merrily confounds it in this Italian translation, has something of the suspense and desperate fascination of a tangle in milady's drawstrings.

Milady in this instance is the miller's beautiful wife (Sophia Loren). The miller's problem is that the governor of the province (Vittorio De Sica) is less than scrupulous about how he uses his authority. And so one night the miller (Marcello Mastroianni) finds himself sitting helplessly on a prison cot while, back at the mill, the governor is occupying the miller's bed. But back at the gubernatorial palace, the governor's wife (Yvonne Sanson) is all alone in the gubernatorial bed. The situation clearly demands robustious action. As always, there is room at the top for an enterprising young man, and the miller is nothing if not eager to climb.

So it goes for more than an hour and a half--proof positive, in CinemaScope and rosy Technicolor, that in the movies no less than in geometry, the triangle is the most stable of figures, a straight line the shortest distance 'twixt two points.

The Seventh Sin (M-G-M). Somerset Maugham's exotically scented brand of soft soap has kept the mass readership in a happy lather for the last half-century. But yesterday's suds, as that shrewd old party could have told the makers of this movie, just won't wash. The Painted Veil (1924), dragged out of Hollywood's bottom drawer, has faded so badly it is hard to recall that on Greta Garbo it looked good.

Maugham wrote his bestseller during the era of the not-quite-emancipated woman--a time when literary convention prescribed, as the natural consequence of adultery, a cholera epidemic. In The Seventh Sin the epidemic is caused by an American girl (Eleanor Parker) married to a British bacteriologist (Bill Travers) but carrying on with a French business man (Jean Pierre Aumont) in Hong Kong. When her husband finds out, he (of course) packs her off posthaste to the nearest outbreak of cholera. Her character immediately begins to improve. The local white trash (George Sanders) philosophically assures her that Schnapps ist gut fuer die Cholera. But at the sight of a corpse the heroine clutches her throat theatrically and gasps: "It makes everything else seem horribly trivial."

Unfortunately, she is not referring to the plot, which continues. Actress Parker goes to a convent, where she acquires Wisdom: "One cannot find peace in the world or in a convent, but only in oneself." Rather than swallow such bromides, the husband dies of cholera, and, as the widow sails away into the sunset, she remarks: "I'm beginning to like myself." It is hard to see why.

The Lonely Man (Paramount) attempts to show that the Stanislavsky Method of acting is right at home on the range. The hero (Jack Palance), like so many disciples of The Method, is 1,000% sincere; he would not dream of speaking a line until he had lived it right down to the last rivet in his denims. The results are sometimes disconcerting.

Time and again Actor Palance just stands there and stares into the camera for minutes on end, his chest heaving with emotions too mighty to express, his eyes rolling desperately, his hands clenching and unclenching as he struggles to bring forth the inner reality of the next line he must utter. "Hi, Riley,'' he may mutter at last, almost inaudibly, and then sag with exhaustion. But by that time the film cutter, understandably worried about how long the audience will be willing to wait for nothing, has generally hurried on to something else without really finishing the scene. As a result, the story becomes peculiarly difficult to follow.

One thing, at any rate, is clear: the hero has a grown son (Anthony Perkins) who thinks that his father pushed his mother off a cliff--a nonsensical notion to have about a man who can hardly push words out of his mouth. Anyway, father and son gradually reconcile and work the range together. As it happens, they single out the same filly (Elaine Aiken), but the son gets a rope on her while the father is still standing there heaving his chest. At the end Actor Palance is still heaving when the villain (Neville Brand) sends him to Boot Hill with a dirty, lowdown, lightning-fast, insincere draw.

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