Five Branded Women (Dino De Laurentiis; Paramount). "I did not loave a German," the proud beauty (Silvana Mangano) sneers at a stern chief (Van Heflin) of the Yugoslav partisans. "I loaved a man!" But the partisans aren't having any of that. They have already mutilated the German sergeant (Steve Forrest) Silvana was committing treason with, and they are obviously determined to cut her up too. A grimy partisan approaches her with scissors drawn. Van twists her arms behind her back. Her bosom heaves. A horrible thought flashes across the spectator's mind. Then they cut off her hair.
As a matter "of fact, they cut the hair off four other girls (Barbara Bel Geddes, Jeanne Moreau, Vera Miles, Carla Gravina) in the same town, because the sergeant evidently got around. And for the rest of this 100-minute movie, which was made in Italy and Austria by Director Martin (The Sound and the Fury) Ritt, the customers watch a quintet of crew-cut cuties who look about as exciting as a boy scout troop on an overnight hike.
Luckily, there is plenty of action to occupy the eye; the girls have a close shave every few minutes. Kicked out of town by the Germans, who don't like to be reminded by their presence of the partisans' power, the fallen women take to the woods, filch food from farmhouses, steal boots and guns from dead Germans, shoot two Home Guards who try to rape them, ambush a Wehrmacht reprisal party, and finally join the same band of partisans that had punished them. Happy ending? Not with 70 minutes still to go. "I must warn you,'' Heflin thunders at the fresh recruits, "that our law forbids sexual relations." Reason: "Bad for morale." Penalty: death. The idea is to sublimate sexual desire into ballistic aggression against the enemy. But the idea does not really work. After banging away for several months. Heroine Mangano turns to Hero Heflin, and, as the audience mutters amen, softly moans: "Will there never be—peace?"
Pollyanna (Walt Disney; Buena Vista), a novel for nice young ladies, published in 1913, by a refined New England novelist named Eleanor H. Porter, was an irresistible tearjerker that drenched the pillows of grandma's generation and added to the language a new word for the sort of softheaded optimist who can see no evil, especially in the mirror, and who hysterically insists on confusing goo with good. The story distilled Victorian sentiment to its treacly essence, and readers of all ages lapped it up. More than a million copies of Pollyanna were sold, and by 1920 the book had been made into a Broadway hit and a Hollywood movie starring Mary Pickford. Forty years later, with his infallible instinct for what will fill the public's sweet tooth. Walt Disney has taken Pollyanna off the back shelf and, at a cost of $3,200,000, has photographed the little horror in throbbing colors, bloated it with big names (Jane Wyman, Richard Egan, Adolphe Menjou. Karl Malden, Agnes Moorehead. Donald Crisp, Nancy Olson), and generally calculated its gasps and sniffles, homilies and heehaws with such shrewdness that Pollyanna emerges on the wide screen as the best live-actor movie Disney has ever made: a Niagara of drivel and a masterpiece of smarm.