The New Pictures

Scarlet Street (Diana Productions-Universal) is an ambitious melodrama bristling with fine directorial touches and expert acting. Its trouble is its painfully obvious story. Producer-Director Fritz Lang, frankly trying to repeat the success he had with The Woman in the Window, has used all the stock props of rough, tough melodrama in his new thriller. There is the sneering, dame-slapping heel of a hero (Dan Duryea), the bad girl (Joan Bennett) who asks to be slapped around and seems to enjoy it, and the frightened, henpecked little middle-aged cashier (Edward G. Robinson) with a simple-minded yen for the girl. Everyone in the picture misbehaves and everyone comes to a bad end. Even so, studio publicists made the most of a decision by New York censors that the film is "indecent, immoral . . . and tending to corrupt morals."

Audiences will not be in much suspense, but they may stay interested just wondering what the dimwitted, unprincipled characters will think of next. They think of a good many things, mostly criminal. Almost as soon as Edward G. Robinson spots Joan Bennett underneath a street lamp, cinemaddicts will be able to predict the general course of events, right up to the final shriek. By the time Robinson tries to hang himself from the light fixture of a cheap hotel room, most audiences may be sick & tired of all the scheming characters and their doomed, impractical schemes.

Loving care went into selecting and photographing such effective minor details as Manhattan streets on a rainy night, Miss Bennett's slatternly Greenwich Village apartment with its cigaret butts in a sink full of dirty dishes, Robinson's gloomy Brooklyn apartment where the sound of the neighbors' radio seeps up through the floor like a cold draft. But the chill look of reality in the sets only emphasizes the two-dimensional unreality of the characters who walk through them.

It Happened at the Inn (MGM International) is the first French movie made during the war to be shown in the U.S. A fantastic, melodramatic little comedy about a French provincial family named Goupi, the film hints broadly that beneath its sparkling surface lies an allegory. Just what the allegory is never becomes clear. But It Happened at the Inn is funny--in a subtler way than its American counterpart, You Can't Take It with You. The Goupis are a family of ferocious, mildly balmy individualists who squabble incessantly among themselves but present a miraculously united front to the world.

Not nearly so elaborately produced as some prewar French films (Story of a Cheat, Carnival in Flanders), It Happened at the Inn also lacks much of the expert, offhand humor of its nearest kin, The Baker's Wife. The new French humor has a hint of violence; there is violence, too, in the insistence on being funny. In the old French movies, you could take the jokes or leave them alone. In It Happened at the Inn, the humorous situations are of a sort you must either take or reject. U.S. audiences are likely to reject quite a few.

Portrait of Maria (MGM International) is a Mexican-made film with an English sound track dubbed in. It thus reverses the traditional practice of dubbing Spanish into Hollywood films so that Spanish-speaking movie audiences will get the impression that Gary Cooper, Shirley Temple, et al. are speaking idiomatic Spanish. U.S. cinemaddicts will not be surprised to hear Maria's heroine (Delores Del Rio) speaking English, but they will note that the sound track doesn't quite match the Del Rio lips--or even the Del Rio voice.

On the whole, it might have been better to leave English out of the film. The dialogue, full of literal translations of Spanish vernacular, is often merely funny where it should be eloquent. The plot, which might have seemed charmingly pastoral in a foreign tongue, seems only out-of-date.

As the outcast Indian girl who is tormented and finally stoned by her self-righteous neighbors, Delores Del Rio is beautiful. She has been deglamorized to the point of allowing a mole on the side of her nose to be photographed, but even in Hollywood her well-modeled face was never lovelier or more expressive. Visual beauty is the best thing about Portrait of Maria, which is the sort of picture that looks better in the lobby stills than it does on the screen. There are handsome shots of Lake Xochimilco and some well-photographed, well-directed crowd scenes. The picture's hero (Pedro Armendariz) is a good-looking, brooding peon, who appears to have a profound store of peasant wisdom; unfortunately, the sound track keeps contradicting that impression.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.