The New Pictures

The Cat and the Canary (Paramount). This old chiller-diller, which has as many lives as a cat, haunted Broadway for a long run, has twice before been made into a movie. Paramount has brushed off some of the cobwebs, draped some bigger, stickier ones for harassed Heroine Paulette Goddard to paw through in the secret passageways, added some new wisecracks.

The goings-on involve the antic humor of dead Uncle Ambrose, who was so crooked, says one of the brand-new gags, he had to be screwed into his grave. To send his grinning ghost into ectospasms, cinemaddicts into delicious shivers, Uncle's post-mortem instructions command his loving heirs to foregather at nightfall in his gloomy mansion amongst the bayous, where they can be scared out of such wits as they possess after being left out of his will. The frolic is furthered by a rubber-masked murderer, The Cat.

If there is a movie fan living who does not know who killed Lawyer Crosby in the wall behind the bookcase, The Cat and the Canary has been imitated often enough for even cinemamateurs to detect The Cat by its feline smile, before it gets the bird.

Scipio Africanus (Italian) is as magnificent a bit of Fascismo as has come out of Italy since Marcus Cato rose to tell the Roman Senate: "Delenda est Carthago" (Carthage must be liquidated). It is also as spectacular a show as the movies have seen since the Italian Quo Vadis? first made the U. S. spectacle-conscious.

The Roman ancestors of present-day Fascists fought three full-length wars with a first-class Semitic power--Carthage. For 17 years Semitic Generalissimo Hannibal made Italy unsafe for Italians; Scipio, played by Cinemactor Annibale (Hannibal) Ninchi, finally defeated him at Zama, near Carthage. Scipio Africanus reviews this ancient history with Latin enthusiasm, Roman corpses, blazing villas, trumpeting war elephants, clanking swords. Up-to-the-minute double meanings for ardent Fascists: 1) the Semite is still public enemy No. 1; 2) conquered Carthage stood in what is now Fascist-coveted French Tunis.

The big, unwieldy battle scenes with their elephant charges are too much like a day at the circus, but Fascist directors have lovingly perfected the technique of making killing realistic. Samples: a soldier with a sword piercing his throat, another transfixed by an arrow, an agonized, trumpeting elephant with a spear sticking in its eye, a soldier caught by a wounded elephant's trunk dashed to pieces against the ground. But there are some surprise shots of tranquil loveliness: a close-up of five banks of oars leisurely sweeping a Roman quinquereme through still water; against a big sunset cloud pile, the beak of Hannibal's galley drifting into Carthage harbor as he returns defeated from Italy.

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