Sometimes a pretty ugly movie like The Hill makes it on dramatic tension alone, and sometimes a dramatically vacuous one like Red Desert makes it purely on pictorial grace. Sometimes a movie like Elio Petri's The Tenth Victim, with Ursula Anbuild-up that fools people into seeing redeeming graces gets a publicity dress, Marcello Mastroianni, and no it.

All the big glossy magazines have run photo-features on Victim, so anyone who misses it is bound to feel as left out as he would having missed Cleopatra. Ironically, the reason the film gets so much coverage helps explain its mediocrity: it does abstract colorfully into journalism; it's apt to sound good on paper, which must be why it got produced.

The plot sounds neat in a couple of sentences. We're in the twenty-first century (as Victim thuds dully onto the science-fiction bandwagon), and there's an international murder tournament called "The Hunt," government-run to sap the aggressions of potential war-mongeers. Anyone who survives ten hunts becomes a "decathlon" and retires with a lush government pension.

Unfortunately this plot can't be amplified or varied enough to sustain interest more than about fifteen minutes. Watching Victim is like trying to watch daytime TV stunt shows for a week.

The central implication of The Hunt is tediously obvious from the opening shot of luscious Ursula Andress ducking bullets: what if a Hunter falls in love with his official Victim? Every hack science-fiction film I've seen since the 50-Foot Woman has provided less predictable dilemmas.

Victim spends most of its time playing with props, mainly to belabor the notion of space-age IBM barrenness. It wields them clumsily, perhaps because it can't decide whether to have fun with them, as James Bond does, or to use them with unnerving and inscrutable dead-pan, as Godard does in Alphaville.

Gimmicks dominate characters. One has the constant sensation of being on a movie set. Where Bond carries a pen-sized aqua lung, Miss Andress calls a crane to kidnap the beach-house Mastroianni is sleeping in. The gimmick is bigger than she is. The whole set, the whole movie, become one tiresome gimmick.

Director Elio Petri is apparently the chief villain, both for taking on so uneventful a screenplay and for composing such ugly shots. Petri used the technicians and the cameraman who worked with Antonioni on Red Desert. He has proven how effectively a film-maker can nullify such technical contributions by composing his images with the carelessness of a soap-opera director.

What should offend more movie-goers is his misuse of Mastroianni's fine acting ability. In a blond crew' cut, playing an action part, the actor is doubly out of his element, neither the suave cosmopolitan of his Fellini roles nor the credibly tough SPECTRE assassin he may be modeled after.

This is an unusually disappointing film because so much talent we've admired elsewhere goes unused. It's hard to believe that the product is so small.