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> In the Midst of Life, the first full-length film by a 32-year-old Frenchman named Robert Enrico, is an adaptation of three stories by Ambrose Bierce, all treating of the U.S. Civil War. Though the picture was made in France with a French cast, the American atmosphere of the period is exquisitely interfused. The story is told in a sure and subtle flow of images, and Jean Boffety's photography makes a grave and lovely homage to Mathew Brady.
> Knife in the Water is a Polish thriller as sharp as a knife and as smooth as water. Director Roman Polanski, 30, puts two lusty men and one busty woman aboard a small sailboat, throws them a knife, and for the next 90 minutes lets the tension build, build, build (see cover picture).
> Hallelujah the Hills, the work of America's Adolfas Mekas, is a gloriously funny and far-out farce about two great big overgrown boy scouts who pratfall in love with the same girl.
> The Fiancés, the second movie made by a 32-year-old Italian named Ermanno Olmi, will probably become a cinema classic. Director Olmi tells an almost too simple story of how absence makes two hearts grow fonder, but he tells it with total mastery of his means.
> The Servant plays morbid variations on the theme of Othello. Directed in Britain by Joseph Losey, an American who lives and works in Europe, the film tells how a sinister servant destroys his master by playing to his weakness for women—and for men.
Shadow of the Bomb. The historians of the new cinema, searching out its origins, go back to another festival, the one at Venice in 1951. That year the least promising item on the cinemenu was a Japanese picture called Rashomon. Japanese pictures, as all film experts knew, were just a bunch of rubber chrysanthemums. So the judges sat down yawning. They got up dazed. Rashomon was a cinematic thunderbolt that violently ripped open the dark heart of man to prove that the truth was not in it. In technique the picture was traumatically original; in spirit it was big, strong, male. It was obviously the work of a genius, and that genius was Akira Kurosawa, the earliest herald of the new era in cinema.
Trained as a painter, Kurosawa got interested in the movies because they seemed to him unnecessarily stupid. Rashomon was his tenth picture, and since Rashomon he has produced a relentless succession of masterpieces. Seven Samurai (1954), considered by many the best action movie ever made, is a military idyl with a social moral: the meek shall inherit the earth—when they learn to fight for their rights. Ikiru (1952), Kurosawa's greatest work, describes the tragedy and transfiguration of a hopelessly ordinary man, a grubby little bookkeeper who does not dare to live until he learns he is going to die. Yojimbo (1962), conceived as a parody of the usual Hollywood western, mingles blood and belly laughs in a ferocious satire on the manners, morals and politics of the 20th century. I Live in Fear (1955), an eerie and comminatory meditation on the life of man in the shadow of the Bomb, was shown last week as a special treat for festival fans but it may never be shown commercially in the U.S.—the exhibitors think it's too hot to handle.