Cinema: The New Pictures, Jan. 13, 1958

All at Sea (Ealing-Balcon; MGM) serves up Alec Guinness in seven roles (one less than he managed in Kind Hearts and Coronets), at one point lets him simmer while he peers haughtily from a cannibal’s pot-au-feu. If some scheme could have been found for him to play all the parts, instead of just seven, the film might have been a comic masterpiece; as things are, it is only fitfully funny. Guinness is loftily addlepated as a Royal Navy captain whose stomach is so queasy that he tosses his tiffin whenever he sights open water, even in a fish bowl. And he mugs masterfully while playing the ghosts of six of his own nautical ancestors.

But the farce is too rubber-legged to stand without constant support, and Guinness is kept much too busy propping it up with grimaces and double takes.

The Enemy Below (20th Century-Fox) is the best game of poker a man could ever hope to kibitz. The table is the wide green South Atlantic—and the game is played under as well as on the table. Lives are at stake, and both the players are cold old professionals. One (Robert Mitchum) is the commander of a U.S. destroyer escort; the other (Curt Jürgens) is the captain of a German submarine.

The U-boat, making for a rendezvous with a surface raider, is sighted by the destroyer. The deadly game begins. The sub crash-dives, rises to periscope depth. Mitchum cunningly presents a target, hoping to draw the sting from the U-boat’s tail—the shots from the stern tubes that cannot be readily reloaded. Jürgens fires; Mitchum, timing by instinct, dodges with seconds to spare and runs in for the kill with depth charges. But the German, reacting quickly, has already dived below the depth the charges are set for. Guessing his game, the American orders the charges reset for greater depth, but the sub circles smartly and vanishes into the vague.

Mitchum thinks hard. Before the sighting, the sub had been steadily heading on a course of 140°, at top speed and on the surface. Surely, he reasons, the German captain would only take such a risk if he had to get somewhere fast; and if so, he would surely get back on his original 140° course as soon as he safely could. Quickly calculating what he would do in the same circumstances, Commander Mitchum resets his course. Half an hour later the destroyer’s sonar picks up the telltale “pong” again.

Jürgens gasps: “He is a devil! He has read my mind.”

So the game goes on. Dick Powell, whose direction is far more exciting than ever his crooning was, plays it to a fare-thee-well. He shows himself a scholar of the grammar of suspense, indicative and subjunctive.

The Adulteress (Hakim; Times Film) sounds as if it might be pornographic. It is based on Emile Zola’s early novel, Thérèse Raquin, a somber slice of life that was called pornographic as soon as it came out. Neither book nor movie is. Written with Naturalist Zola’s unfailing passion for the sordid underside of reality, the book showed how illicit love led to murder, how murder turned love to hate, how hate led to plots of new murders, and how a couple of suicides ended the whole bloody business. The movie plucks the story from the hands of fate and throws it into the lap of chance. It moves the locale from the Left Bank of the Seine to the wrong side of the Rhone, where an impassioned Lyonnaise beauty (Simone Signoret), bored with an inadequate husband, meets “un homme, un vrai” in the form of an Italian truck driver (Raf Vallone). The lovers do not plot the husband’s death, but they kill him anyway. After that, accidents keep following each other as if in mockery of Zola’s thesis that the punishment must sprout from the seed of the crime.