The New Pictures

The Swordsman (Columbia) is set in 18th Century Scotland (which apparently never had a dour day) but still it's just another western. In fact, a few of the grizzled old clansmen lapse into an occasional drawl. Even Hero Larry Parks appears to be still playing in his most successful picture. The Jolson Story: at one point he declaims vibrantly: "Ah luhvs yuh!" But no oater-fan is likely to object to any of the escapes and chases and pounding hooves.

The Technicolor, in piercing circus poster colors, puts the lassies into rich kirtles and the laddies into brave plaid pantaloons. Everyone also cuts such fine figures of speech that Parks gets an unscheduled giggle when he says (of his own destiny): "I canna stop the wind."

That Hagen Girl (Warner) begins as a sociological case history and ends as a soap opera. The case: a wealthy smalltown family smuggles daughter home from somewhere on a night train. The doctor comes and the windows to daughter's room are barred. The town correctly guesses that she is insane. The same train has also brought a middle-aged townswoman and a baby.

A few idle words of gossip connect the two events; a little more gossip surmises the parentage of the baby. Suspicion is documented when the middle-aged woman begins to receive a regular "insurance" check, and a young man (Ronald Reagan) who was in love with the sick girl leaves town.

When the baby grows up to be Shirley Temple, she finds out why people have always referred to her as "that Hagen girl" and why parents and teachers deal her out of the lead in the high-school play.

She bears up because her father presumptive, who has meanwhile come back to town, takes an interest in her and promises to send her to college. But when her beau elopes with a belle of established parentage, the Hagen girl jumps in the local lagoon. The plot hauls her out but sends the picture to the bottom like a stone.

After reels of behaving like Shirley's father, Reagan suddenly exhibits an unpaternal passion, explains breathlessly that he isn't really her father, and marries her. Moviegoers with very strong stomachs may be able to view an appearance of rebated incest as a romantic situation.

Hungry Hill (Rank; Prestige), at its clearest, appears to be a plea for the abolition of the 19th Century. Everything else about this British cinemadaptation of Daphne du Maurier's novel is equally impossible. It begins in Ireland atop a large rocky lump of earth (see title) which a greedy capitalist named Brodrick is determined to excavate. A member of the lower classes prophesies that "woe" and "the end of everything green and beautiful" will betide if the hill is mined for copper. For three generations (roughly 90 minutes), flunkeys announce woe more often than dinner ("There's terrible trouble at the mines!"). The trouble causes the death of three Brodricks in two generations, drives the heroine (Margaret Lockwood) to heroin. Moviegoers have an easier out.

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