The New Pictures

The Sun Also Rises (Darryl F. Zanuck; 20th Century-Fox) is real Hemingway almost all the way. The characters of Hemingway's first topflight novel come truly alive in this film--often in the fine individual triumphs of some actors over their own miscasting. It is the story itself --the Lost Generation expatriates running away from themselves in Paris and Spain--that sometimes stumbles, as if Producer Darryl F. Zanuck and Director Henry King had decided that the best way to condense the novel on film would be literally to shoot the action and dialogue in well-chosen chunks. Half the book is better than none, but the over-all effect is jerky. Nonetheless, in its best sequences, Sun shines more brilliantly than anything of Hemingway's ever filmed before.

There is commendable candor in the film's telling of its strange love story. Hemingway fans, anticipating how the movie might mistreat the tragic circumstance of the hero's sexual impotency resulting from a battle wound, will be happy to learn that Jake Barnes (sensitively played by Tyrone Power) is informed of his deficiency in exactly that term--"impotent." Nor is there any pussyfooting about the nymphomania of the heroine, who settles for all men in lieu of Jake whom she loves; as man-crazy Lady Ashley (Brett), Ava Gardner turns in the most realistic performance of her career. The other major characters also rise to true book size. As Robert Cohn, the unwanted, brooding Jew, Mel Ferrer is especially convincing. The fascinating quintet converging on Pamplona for the fiesta is rounded out by Errol Flynn (wonderful as boozy Mike Campbell, the happy-went-lucky bankrupt) and Eddie Albert (as Bill Gorton, everybody's pal).

The period sets of the 1920s in Paris and Pamplona, through which these disoriented drifters pass, are gaudily authentic, and indoors or out, the color camera work (directed by Leo Tover) catches the blues of Toulouse-Lautrec in Paris, the gold of Goya in Spain's sunny streets. Against these backgrounds, the essence of Sun is played out. The difficult role of Brett's ultimate conquest, young Bullfighter Pedro Romero, is played with fierce intensity by handsome newcomer Robert Evans. In the movie's arena sequence, Actor Evans conveys Hemingway's paradoxical feeling of affection for what he kills ("The bulls are my best friends"), just as Brett always momentarily loves the men she ruins.

It is too bad that, in the end, Producer Zanuck and Director King do not quit when Hemingway is ahead. The film's semihappy ending is an altogether sappy ending. The book made it plain that there was no hope for Jake and Brett ever to alter or escape their anguished, futile bondage. Yet the movie has them finally agreeing to the silver-lined proposition that "there must be some answer for us --somewhere."

At a sneak preview of Sun in Riverside, Calif., some 1,200 moviegoers turned in ballots indicating which of the film's stars they liked most. Even though his name was not on the ballots, Robert Evans, 27, Sun's bullfighter, drew a surprising 20% write-in acclaim, was identified in many instances only as "Romero" or "the bullfighter." This reaction, mostly from females in the audience, appeared to confirm the judgment of Producer Zanuck, who had already optioned Bob Evans for a five-year contract (two films annually). Zanuck's blurb for Evans: "The most exciting young man since Valentino."

The story behind Bob Evans' brief movie career sounds like an implausible scenario. As a garmentmaker in Manhattan's Seventh Avenue district, Evans, an executive vice president of Evan-Piccone, Inc., a top women's sportswear firm, is already earning more than Hollywood will pay him--unless he becomes a first-magnitude star. Last year Evans was lounging beside a Beverly Hills swimming pool, minding his own business, when he was seen by oldtime Cinemactress Norma Shearer. He reminded her so strongly of her late husband, Producer Irving Thalberg, onetime boy wonder of Hollywood that Norma arranged for Evans to test for the Thalberg role in Lon Chaney's screen biography, Man of a Thousand Faces (TIME, Aug. 26). Businessman Evans won the part, played it so individualistically that he got violently mixed notices (some cheers and a thunderous boo from the New York Times).

After finishing his Hollywood chores Evans went back to Manhattan, though little about movies until one evening las

March when both he and Darryl Zanuck wandered into the same nightspot. Unaware that Evans had ever been in a movie, Zanuck discovered him again, signed him for the bullfighter role that the producer had tried unsuccessfully to cast for many months. Actor Evans, whose performance as Pedro Romero was hailed by the Times last week ("perfectly personified"), is delighted by prospects of a new career. But he approaches it with businesslike caution. Says Producer Zanuck's nomination for successor to Valentino: "It's nice to have a contract."

The Last Bridge (Cosmopol; Union) is one of the most eloquent and inexorable filmed arguments against war since All Quiet on the Western Front. One proof of its persuasive neutrality: after being made (with Communist sanction) in Yugoslavia, the movie, exquisitely directed by Helmut Kautner, won the International Catholic Film Prize. With eerie detachment, the film takes no sides, defends no ideology, neither condemns nor justifies the actions of its agonized pawns of war. Its clashing foes are Hitler's well-equipped troops and Tito's short-rationed guerrillas, struggling in the Balkans late in World War II. But, as recorded by Kautner's cameras, "suffering is the only enemy."

In its charting of the ebb and flow of war's malignant tides, the movie ruthlessly sends its heroine into action for both sides; yet she proves to be neither turncoat nor indecisive fool nor coward. Dr. Helga Reinbeck (played with passionate intensity by Europe's fast-rising Maria Schell) is serving as head nurse in a German field hospital. By a ruse, a band of partisans whose own doctor is severely wounded succeeds in kidnaping her. After the partisans' doctor dies in her care, they offer her a grim choice: help us or follow him. The decision tears Helga in two, not because she fears execution, but because she must measure her narrow patriotism against her involvement in all mankind, her diminution by any man's death. "I always believed," a partisan chief (Bernhard Wicki) tells her, "that to a doctor, wounded enemies are also human beings." Placing humanity before country, Helga sets to work with all her strength. But her lifesaving chores bring her no sense of exaltation, no expiation, no liberty pass from the anguished no man's land that lies between her warring loyalties.

The movie relentlessly propels Dr. Helga Reinbeck toward a pitiless, inescapable end. Typhus cuts down scores of the Yugoslav fighters. Their medicine supplies run out. Helga and a woman partisan (Barbara Rutting), veiled in the garb of Moslem peasants, steal into a Nazi-held town to retrieve a cache of drugs concealed there. After the other woman is killed, Helga, bearing the medicines, sets off alone across a bridge, ignoring the fusillades that crackle from both banks of the river it spans. Then the enemies, in one of those little miracles that sometimes momentarily halt a war, recognize her as a figure of mercy transcending their strife. Both sides call for a ceasefire. Dr. Helga delivers her package to her enemies, staggers back toward her German compatriots, collapses upon the bridge. The cease-fire was ordered too late. A stray bullet--little matter whose--has mortally wounded her.

The midday sun sears her still form, lying quietly in the dust. She is herself a fallen bridge between mankind's sundered parts. For a moment, before the small arms shatter the brief truce, Helga Reinbeck's silence is louder than all the guns.

Battle Hell (Wilcox-Neagle; DCA). Britain's pride in her navy is amply documented here in a superbly realistic re-enactment of Britain's own "Yangtze incident." In the spring of 1949, when the Reds were taking control in China, the British frigate H.M.S. Amethyst steamed up the Yangtze, bound for Nanking, to bring supplies to Britain's embassy. The Chinese Communist army, deployed on the Yangtze's north bank and preparing to make many crossings, opened up on the Amethyst, clobbered the vessel without provocation, nearly sank her before she ran aground. This all happened before Korea, but what followed was a good clue to the Chinese Communists' knack for flitting without pause from atrocious war fare to attritious negotiation -- a harbinger of Panmunjom and the 24-month palavering that, even now, grinds on in Geneva.

As a spit-&-polish naval attache who takes over the refloated ship after the Amethyst's captain dies of his wounds, Richard Todd is so convincing that the movie conveys a real-thing flavor. It car ries all the blood-and-sweat conviction of a candid film chronicle made on the spot.

Aboard ship there are no signs of acting, but the movie does sag a bit into detect able histrionics when Akim Tamiroff, as a cunning Red warlord, shows up as a negotiator and puts on a dazzling display of inscrutability. The months wear on, and Lieut. Commander Todd begins to understand the superiority of spit to polish. At last, with the courage of a heart made whole, Todd runs the battered vessel past artillery-lined riverbanks on a wild, 140-mile nighttime dash to sea. It is all history now, but the capable direction of Michael (Around the World in 80 Days) Anderson has made it happen again believably.

*Not to be confused with the Japanese bombing and sinking of the U.S. gunboat Panay on the Yangtze, upstream from Nanking on Dec. 12, 1937.

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