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Take My Life (Rank; Eagle-Lion). An opera singer's husband is accused of strangling a former mistress; his wife (sumptuous Greta Gynt) finds out whodunit. This English thriller in the Hitchcock tradition is no world-shaker, but it is done with intelligence and a flair for fright.

Relentless (Columbia). Robert Young, Marguerite Chapman and Barton MacLane in a Technicolored scrimmage for gold. Their work and an unusually good production give this slick western an illusion of quality it doesn't really have.

Black Bart (Universal-International). Yvonne de Carlo (in glowing Technicolor) as Lola Montez; Dan Duryea and Jeffrey Lynn as rival swains and bandits. There is little illusion of quality about this western, and too little of the deadpan kidding that has made some other De Carlo pictures a pleasure.

Jassy (Rank; Universal-International). Handsome, hard-working Margaret Lockwood as a gypsy who marries a man she loathes for the sake of a man she loves. Never mind hurrying to the movie just to find out why: it merely proves that the British can make bad ones, too.

The Raven (Westport International), a cross between a whodunit and Spoon River Anthology, is an excellent story idea and an extremely good movie. The story: someone in a French provincial town begins writing painfully wellinformed poison-pen letters, signed "The Raven." Gradually, The Raven's malice eats into every chink and crevice in the town's uneasy conscience. By the time the culprit is exposed, the community is on the verge of a collective nervous breakdown.

Author Louis Chavance, who developed this cruel design for drama from an actual incident, and Henri-Georges Clouzot, who directed the film, have taken shrewd advantage of rich possibilities. They have put such intelligence into their melodrama that it often gives the illusion of transcending melodrama. Their film has speed, energy and tension that are rare in French movies; their character sketches are deft, searching and resourcefully visualized. Their keyhole portrait of a community is a caricature, but a remarkably effective one.

The Raven comes to the U.S. under a cloud that is mostly hot air. The picture was made with German financing during the occupation. Rumor said that it was so ruthless an exposure of French decadence that it was shown in Germany, as anti-French propaganda, under the title A Small French City. Actually, the film is neither more nor less anti-nationalist than the work of any intelligent, morally responsible artist, in time of peace or war. Propaganda or not, the picture was not shown in wartime Germany; indeed it was banned there (Germans, after all, might observe that no such healthy self-criticism was permitted at home).

Because he made films for a German-controlled company, Director Clouzot was forbidden to work for two years after the liberation; then he made Quai des Orfevres (Jenny Lamour) which is just as unflattering to the French as The Raven, and just as popular--with Frenchmen. Author Chavance says stoutly of his Raicn: "It is no more anti-French than Chicago gangster pictures are anti-American."

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