Films

That scuffed-up but lovable brood, the Waldens of Georgia and their cotton-pickin' kinfolk, have been somewhat scrubbed, ennobled and dehorned in Philip Yordan's screen adaptation of God's Little Acre, based on the Caldwell novel of carnal kicks and mild social protest. You remember the panting order: Jim Leslie Walden (Lance Fuller) drools over Griselda (Tina Louise), who's stuck on her sister-in-law's husband Will (Aldo Ray). Fat, sweaty Pluto (Buddy Hackett) has the hots for Darlin' Jill (Fay Spain), kittenish daughter of Ty Ty (Robert Ryan). But Jill craves action with all the crackers in Georgia, including an albino (Michael Landon), before sampling Pluto. As a result of all this impulsive exploration, tempers flare and tragedy looms. The principals do right smart by their roles under Anthony Mann's direction, but somehow the gutsy fatalism of the novel's grimy characters, which boosted the book's appeal, has been lost, though most of their lust binges, toned down a bit, remain. (The scene where Will rips off Griselda's ginghams was nixed for the movie, but you saw it last month in Playboy.) Don't go too far out of your way for this one.

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Miscegenation gets a backpat in Kings Go Forth, a World War II yarn (from the same-name Joe David Brown novel) starring Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis and Natalie Wood. But compared to Island in the Sun and Sayonara it is a mild pat indeed. Frank plays a square artillery lieutenant who, under Delmer Daves' direction, oozes wistfulness throughout. T/5 Tony is saddled with a role that would give a schizo trouble: coward-hero, swell guy--louse, hip-jerk. The pair fight Germans in the French mountains on weekdays, then commute to the Riviera on Saturday and Sunday. There, Sinatra meets and falls for Natalie Wood, a Yank kid raised in France by her white mother (Leora Dana) and Negro father who died a few years earlier. But Tony Curtis' wizardry as a jazz trumpeter wins her away from Frank; Tony and Miss Wood start making beautiful music together. Learning that Curtis doesn't intend to marry her, Sinatra plans to kill him during a dangerous two-man mission to blow up the Nazi HQ. The denouement devised by scripter Merle Miller is both predictable and flat, and so is the picture.

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Run Silent, Run Deep is an absorbing picture of Pacific warfare as it was fought on (but mostly under) the water. Clark Gable plays a desk-bound officer at Pearl who chafes at inaction, itches to have a go at the Japanese destroyer that sank his sub in Bungo Strait (where many of our subs met the same fate), finally talks himself into command of the submarine Nerka. This creates a state of near-mutinous dismay in the crew and in the popular exec officer, Burt Lancaster, who shared his men's belief that he'd get the job when the sub's erstwhile captain was disabled. The unhappy men get unhappier still when Gable first subjects them to endless crash-dive drills, then violates his patrol orders by heading for the lethal straits, bent on revenge against Bungo Pete, the destroyer that had nailed him once before. Gable, too, is injured -- which gives Lancaster a chance to legally take over and head the other way; but the sputtering feud between the two men is resolved via a grudging mutual admiration, the vessel gets its enemy (which turns out to be an unsuspected team of destroyer plus lurking Jap sub), and the Nerka sails home victorious. Sans Gable, though: his injury claims him immediately after he wills himself to live long enough to direct the winning strategy. Kids will love this -- no dames or love stuff interfere with the action, and it's all hokey enough (and authentic enough) to satisfy the critical junior scientists. But underneath the hokum and the familiar plot notion, there's enough tension and action to satisfy you, too.