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Between Two Worlds (Warner) is a face-lifting job on Sutton Vane's Outward Bound, which 20 years ago was a Broadway hit (and has been a perennial stand-by for amateur theatricals ever since), 14 years ago was a successful movie. But the new wrinkles are not always as good as the old lines.

The old version began with a group of passengers aboard an ocean liner. Audiences enjoyed a creeping chill as they became aware that the fellow travelers were genteel ghosts outward bound for eternity. In the new version most of the passengers are slapped into the Beyond by a bomb at the beginning of the film, and cinemaudiences know from the start what they are in for. Result: a notable lapse in 1) suspense, 2) immediacy, since the presence of Merchant Mariner George Tobias hardly compensates for the lack of a single uniform aboard the strangely uncrowded phantom ferry.

The new passenger list includes: a cynical journalist (John Garfield), a high-society snob (Isobel Elsom), her humble husband (Gilbert Emery), a golddigger (Faye Emerson), a country clergyman (Dennis King), a merchant mariner (George Tobias), an industrialist (George Coulouris), a charwoman (Sara Allgood), a pair of cultivated suicides (Paul Henreid, Eleanor Parker). Nearly all the parts are well played, though as individuals and as moral and social symbols, the characters seem over-genteel, stagily conceived, dated. But Edmund Gwenn is a competently ghostly steward, Sydney Greenstreet a subtly alarming embodiment of the Last Judgment. And compared with recent bows to the Beyond--a .cheerful Chiclet like A Guy Named Joe, a quiet sniffle over the aspidistras like Happy Land, a jumbo box of mentholated Kleenex like Tender Comrade--this older mixed metaphor of death seems all but inspired.

The Yellow Canary (RKO-Radio) is porcelain-jawed Anna Neagle sacrificing her good name by flashlighting the Luftwaffe's way to Buckingham Palace. Just to watch reputable Cinemactress Neagle play a fifth columnist for half a picture-length without once tipping the audience a wink or an apology is rather novel. More traditional kinds of suspense involve saboteurs, spies, counterspies and a plot to blow up Halifax. There is also a stunningly funny old comic (Margaret Rutherford), playing the sort of tetched, tweedy Englishwoman whose lightest whisper is a yawp. As a spy-thriller, the picture would be no better than pleasantly, mediocre but for the unshakable British talent for investing bit-players at telephones, extras at lifeboat drill, and even the leading players with vitality, intelligence and a nodding acquaintance with actual life.

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