The New Pictures

The Fuller Brush Man (Columbia), an eager boob played by Red Skelton, attracts trouble as infallibly as he repels sales prospects. When one of the latter is murdered, Red is suspected. He spends the rest of the picture chin-deep in gunmen, detectives and pretty girls. One of the girls, Janet Blair, is about the prettiest sweater model in movies; Skelton, given half a chance, can be quite funny; the scripters have given him better-than-average chances.

The grand finale, a life & death chase staged in a War Surplus warehouse, is full of the ingenious low-comedy ideas which practically nobody seems to be able to think up these days. The desperate obstacle race takes place among instantly inflating life rafts, stockpiles of prefabricated barracks, bouncy camouflage nets, a regular holocaust of naval flares. It's good, fast, noisy fun; but the good comic ideas are never really milked of their possibilities as they used to be by Chaplin and Keaton and Lloyd.

Another Part of the Forest (Universal-International) is Lillian Hellman's study of the five Little Foxes and how they grew; the Hubbard family is seen in 1880, 20 years before The Little Foxes. They are a horrifying image of the newborn New South: a self-made, egomaniacal father (Fredric March); a deeply pious, almost mindless mother (March's wife Florence Eldridge); a mild-seeming, Machiavellian son (Edmond O'Brien); a whining, fatuous son (Dan Duryea); a diamond-hard daughter (Ann Blyth). Night & day they connive against each other; during any chance breathing spell they work on their neighbors.

Mother Hubbard is a gentle creature--all she does is to furnish son Ben with a blackmailing stranglehold on his tyrannical father. Son Oscar is just a born ninny; he tries hard to be a stinker but he hasn't the talent. But the other three would make a quarrelsome day in a bear pit look insipid. Now & then, as they shift grips on each other and set-to all over again, their unmitigated hellishness comes very near absurdity. But they are never undramatic.

Whatever its excesses, this is a bitterly, fiercely exciting play.

Miss Hellman's play is the kind a stage cast can really sink its teeth in; and it has been screened with a Broadway kind of incisiveness. It isn't in any pure sense a movie; but under Michael Gordon's direction it is a nearly perfect example of how to film a play. There is hardly a shot which does not set up visual tension against the lashing, steel-spring dialogue; there is not a single performance which is short of adequate; the work of Miss Eldridge, Mr. O'Brien and Betsey Blair, as a shaky-minded neighbor, is much more.

In one place in this film, music is used with great intelligence. When father Hubbard hires some musicians from Mobile to play his Opus 3, they are good but not too good at their jobs; the piano is the good but imperfect instrument you would expect to find in such a home; and Opus 3 is perfectly what might be expected of a vain, surprisingly talented but utterly derivative, provincial composer.

Four Faces West (Enterprise; United Artists). The true western has an almost Grecian classicism of form. Four Faces West actually isn't a "western" at all, but a popular novel with a western setting. Its hero, Joel McCrea, holds up a bank for a calculated, moderate sum ($2,000) and for a virtuous purpose: he wants to help his old man out of a hole. It is clear at all times that he intends to return the money.

He is the first Face West. The second, McCrea's lovely wife Frances Dee, is a railroad nurse; she is determined to follow him and help him, no matter what wrong he has done, or trouble he runs into. The third, Joseph Calleia, is a gambler who also likes McCrea, and helps him out against the Law. The fourth, Charles Bickford, is the Law. But in this remarkably polite picture, the Law likes the Bandit, too; and the Bandit, in order to take care of a large, forlorn family of Mex-Americans, flattened by diphtheria, gives up his last, desperate chance to escape across the Border.

In spite of the relative gentleness of the story, there is some good brisk action, nice chase work and excellent riding. Most of the picture's considerable charm, however, comes from something quite different. In nearly all western films, classical or not, you get a happy sense of landscape, sunlight, good animals and vigorous people, which is lacking in the ruck of movies. But all that, as a rule, is carelessly incidental. Harry Sherman, who produced this one, is a veteran of westerns, but long experience has not staled him. He really knows these people, and this country. As he brings them before you, with the deep knowledge which only love can bring to life, they are a pleasure to watch.

CURRENT & CHOICE

The Iron Curtain. A blunt-spoken thriller about the Soviet-Canadian atomic spy ring, with Dana Andrews as the man who cracked it (TIME, May 17).

The Sainted Sisters. An easy-to-like comedy in which Veronica Lake and Joan Caulfield, city crooks, try to fleece a down-East village (TIME, May 17).

So This Is New York. A deftly daffy screen version of Ring Lardner's The Big Town, with radio's Henry Morgan (TIME, May 10).

Kings of the Olympics. Leni Riefenstahl's grandly photographed study of the 1936 Olympic Games, trimmed down for U.S. moviegoers (TIME, May 3).

The Big Clock. A handsome, gold-filled thriller about a murdering magazine magnate; with Ray Milland and Charles Laughton (TIME, April 19).

Paisan. Roberto Rossellini's six slices of wartime life in Italy, the best of them even better than his Open City (TIME, April 19).

All My Sons. Edward G. Robinson, Burt Lancaster and Mady Christians in a good screen translation of Arthur Miller's prize play (TIME, April 12).

Mr. Standings Builds His Dream House. Gary Grant and Myrna Loy fall among contractors (TIME, April 12).

I Remember Mama. Domestic comedy and pathos, richly presented by George Stevens; with Irene Dunne, Oscar Homolka, Barbara Bel Geddes (TIME, April 5).

Farrebique. A year on a French farm translated into film poetry (TIME, March 15).

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