The New Pictures

Fallen Angel (20th Century-Fox) drags its feathers through an hour and a half of melodramatic fiddle-faddle that is just promising enough to sharpen the edge of disappointment. Good direction by Otto (Laura) Preminger and competent acting cannot quite save a picture whose whole is far more trivial than the sum of its individual parts.

An odd mixture of tough talk and greeting-card sentiment, Fallen Angel includes a bogus clairvoyant (John Carradine), a church organist (Alice Faye) and a pair of underprivileged lovebirds (Linda Darnell and Dana Andrews). In the resulting tangle, everyone is left to act pretty much for himself. The lovebirds come out best. Dana Andrews is a fallen angel with a mouthful of romantic talk and an eye for the main chance. Linda Darnell is Stella, a sulkily beautiful hash slinger who is weary of driving men to madness rather than to matrimony.

Stella keeps the plot alive as long as it allows her to live. But her naturally high voltage and low taste in friends apparently mark her from the beginning as the victim of a crime of passion. When she is rubbed out, tedium sets in. The scene finally gets so crowded with suspicious-looking people that by the time the villain is led away to jail you have the feeling that far too many untrustworthy characters are still lurking about on the wrong side of the bars.

Alice Faye's return to the screen in the role of an unloved but triumphantly virtuous bride is not likely to add to or detract from her present reputation as a broad-shouldered blonde with a rich, husky voice. She does no singing in this picture, but her speaking voice is richly husky as ever even though she doesn't have much to say.

The House I Live In (RKO-Radio) is a worthy, heartfelt short on religious and racial tolerance. The main trouble is that those who need it--the race-rioting bigots and barfly commandos--will doubtless think it is meant for someone else.

Frank Sinatra is the chief spokesman and one of the chief promoters of this serious scolding to the race-conscious. He breaks up a gang of junior neighborhood toughs who are about to beat up a kid vaguely described as belonging to the wrong church. Sinatra then delivers a lecture: without traditional U.S. tolerance, Presbyterian Colin Kelly and his Jewish bombardier, Meyer Levin, would never have become great U.S. heroes.

This well-meaning project is part of a larger Sinatra crusade (TIME, Oct. 1). It was staged with free help from topflight Hollywood talent: Producer Frank Ross, Director Mervyn LeRoy, Writer Albert Maltz (Pride of the Marines). They got the idea for the picture when they learned that Sinatra had been making spontaneous visits to high schools where he preached little sermons on tolerance. The short's message should be clear enough to anyone. To keep the bobby-sox trade in their seats, Sinatra tosses in two songs, If You Are But a Dream and a ballad with a lesson called The House I Live In.

Hold That Blonde! (Paramount) is a direct lineal descendant of one of Hollywood's biggest breadwinners during the '20s: the Harold Lloyd comedies of confusion. Eddie Bracken, in a pretty good modern imitation of the Lloyd hurlyburly, teeters precariously on the ledge of a skyscraper, wrestles with a drunk at the frail end of a flagpole and is chased through a maze of hotel corridors by a sinister set of hoodlums.

The motivation for this hairbreadth nonsense is a $500,000 diamond necklace. Bracken gets involved only because he is a featherbrained kleptomaniac. The hoodlums keep busy because they have their workaday jobs to do. Veronica Lake is vaguely and halfheartedly associated with the hoodlums.

Whether modern cinemaddicts will be amused by such stuff is Paramount's long shot. For many, Miss Lake's emaciated glamor and Bracken's solid sense of inanity will be enough. Others may enjoy being reminded of what they or their elders used to laugh at.

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