The New Pictures

Salome, Where She Danced (Universal) has got practically everything except the rise of Silas Lapham and the decline & fall of the Roman Empire, and there seems to be no reason except pure niggardliness that they should not have been worked in too. Items: defeated General Robert E. Lee telling a Confederate soldier (David Bruce) that "we must move with the ages"; a Berlin correspondent for Leslie's Weekly (Rod Cameron) scooping the world on the opening of Bismarck's Austro-Prussian War, with the help of a dancer named Anna Maria (Yvonne de Carlo); Anna Maria emerging from a shell to the strains of The Blue Danube to dance some elementary ballet; an energetic cavalry battle in which her lover, a Hapsburg Prince, loses the war and his life rather than cause her political embarrassment in Berlin; a scene in a raw Western U.S. town, in which Anna Maria calms the beavered natives by executing, as Salome, the hootchy-kootchy; a scene in which she reforms the quondam Confederate, turned local bandit, by her snarling contralto rendition of Der Tannenbaum (Maryland! My Maryland!); San Francisco in its heyday, which includes 1) an infatuated Russian multimillionaire (Walter Slezak), 2) the attempted pirating of a Chinese junk, 3) its sagacious proprietor, who speaks Oriental proverbs in Edinburr dialect, 4) a duel with rapiers on a blood-red floor, 5) a hair-raising stagecoach chase, 6) a happy ending. This does not, perhaps, give a very clear idea of the story, but that is no great loss. One of the odd things about this odd picture is that there really is an Arizona town called Salome--Where She Danced. It was named; however, after a native, a Mrs. Grace Salome Pratt; and it is called, for short, Suhloam. The oddest thing of all, though, is that the show is quite a lot of fun. Most of the color and costuming is garishly pretty; the dialogue is richly flavored with such tongue-in-cheek lines as one man's description of the heroine: "She was always a great artist--but above all--a woman." Miss de Carlo, a newcomer to the screen, is not exactly persuasive as the great artist, but as a woman, especially in her Salome number, she brings the house down.

Dillinger (Monogram) is the story of a Public Enemy No. i whose misbehavior seems so innocuous, beside the work of later international candidates, that you can almost smell the sachet along with the tear gas and gunpowder. The picture recalls how this born delinquent knocked over a string of banks, a mail train, a harmless elderly couple and two of his associates; and how at last his girl betrayed him to G-men, who shot him down as he walked out of a nickelodeon. Fortunately, this old-fashioned story is told in an old-fashioned way. The result: a tough, tight, tense, tricky little melodrama.

This sort of storytelling, related to balladry but a lot less long-winded, is not new to the screen. But it has been neglected so long that it is as good as new. Combined with evocative sets and appropriate performance (by Lawrence Tierney, Edmund Lowe, Anne Jeffreys and others), and admirably terse, it provides a tinnily entertaining, cinematically energetic antidote to the two-hour doses of pure unflavored gelatin now alarmingly on the increase. Significantly, it was made quickly on very little money, as pictures go, and for a humble but reliable audience--the general equivalent of the audience which reads pulp magazines. Its overall cost was $150,000. It was shot in 21 days. The screen play was slapped together in a week.

"I Should Bother . . ." The authors of Dillinger, both 30, are lean, bespectacled Philip Yordan and ebullient, jut-chinned William Castle, whose melodrama When Strangers Marry (which Castle directed as well as coauthored) was so well liked by carriage-trade critics last fall that it is soon to be rereleased. Of these white-haired boys, the one that shines the brighter in the terms Hollywood best understands is Yordan. Reason: Yordan is already up to his ears in the jackpot.

His Anna Lucasta is more in demand in Hollywood than any play since Life with Father. He has been offered as high as $1,000,000 for the screen rights. Hedy Lamarr and Lauren Bacall and Greta Garbo have all tried to persuade their bosses to buy it for them. (In the play, as first written, Anna and her family were Polish.) Among the top bidders are David Selznick and Mervyn LeRoy. Yet Yordan refuses to sell Anna Lucasta at any price unless he is allowed to co-produce the picture.

He is in demand as a $2,500-a-week screen writer, but is strictly undazzled; he walked out on a polishing job (Mil dred Pierce) at that pay as soon as he learned that Jack Warner requires his writers to show up at 9 : 30 and leave at 5.

Yordan can well afford such independence.

His 10% of the weekly gross on Lucasta ($21,000) has hardly varied a quarter a week since the play hit Broadway, and Artkino wants him to bring the show to Moscow -- an offer which he plans to ac cept as soon as the New York audiences begin to fall off. At the same time he is enjoying too much freedom and making too much money as a partner in King Bros. Productions, an independent unit with Monogram, to have to feel that his position, for the time being, is im provable. "We are making A stories on a C budget," he explains. "I should bother with the 'prestige' of writing for a big studio!" $250,000 a Year and Freedom. Frank and Morrie King are young promoters (in their early 30s) whose other interests range from slot machines in Los Angeles to horse racing in Mexico. At the time they met Yordan, in the spring of '43, they had already made a couple of pic tures. Though they had realized a respect able profit, they did not receive the ac claim they had somehow expected. Their deal: Yordan would contribute "class" and a third of the money; in return they would give Yordan all the freedom he wanted (all there is), and 'a one-third share of the business. Result: between King Bros, and Lucasta, Yordan makes not far short of $250,000 a year. And he is probably the only man in Hollywood who has complete autonomy over what he is doing.

He acts out his scripts for the brothers, whose respect for his literacy is reverent; and he doesn't even have to do that for Monogram, which merely distributes for him. It is a very pretty pitch indeed, as Yordan will explain: "In the small-picture field there is a fixed gross, that is, you can almost tell how much you're going to make to a penny. I plan to use it as an experimental theater."

Yordan's experiments, so far, are at once vigorous and surefire: he believes in hard, straight storytelling, draws richly on and writes skillfully for deep-city folk of the kind that swarm North Side Chicago's Wilson Avenue, where he grew up.

On the side, Yordan is co-producing Ma-ritta Wolff's Whistle Stop (he wrote the script) with Seymour (Mayerling) Neben-zal. He has the script ready for his next movie, Crime and Punishment, with the setting changed from St. Petersburg to Boston.

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