The New Pictures

Mr. Peabody & the Mermaid (Universal-International). Mr. Peabody (William Powell), a proper Bostonian on vacation far from Beacon Street, hooks the Mermaid (Ann Blyth) in Caribbean waters. He keeps her first in his bathtub, then in his fish pond. He likes her, more than seems proper for a married man to like a mermaid. She likes him, too. She bites a girl who is flirting with him, and causes his jealous wife to huff back to Boston. In the long run the lovers have to part and a psychiatrist takes over with a full explanation. Men around 50, he points out simply, are liable to start seeing things.

Few things are sorrier than fantasy that does not jell. This doesn't. William Powell has had long experience in playing a flustered man of distinction, but this time he plays it as if it were one experience too many. Miss Blyth is about as ichthyoid as you can get and still interest more forward-looking vertebrates. During the long buildup to her first appearance there seems to be some hope for the movie; but once they have a mermaid on their hands, the people who made the picture haven't even a Peabody's idea what to do with her. Once, under water, they get her to dab at her tears; the balance of their ingenuity is exhausted in keeping one thing & another between the censors and her bosom.

Scripter-Producer Nunnally Johnson has a pleasant wit, but in this show, most of the time, it is only working in second gear; and at best, he is no magician. In simple justice, the question arises: Would anyone know, any better, what to do with a mermaid?

Return of the Bad Men (RKO Radio] has enough bad men in the cast to stock a year's output of westerns. It includes such semi-legendary desperadoes as Billy the Kid, Wild Bill Doolin, Wild Bill Yeager, The Arkansas Kid, Cole, Jim & John Younger, Emmett, Bob & Grat Dalton, and the Sundance Kid. Unfortunately, it turns out to be a case of too many crooks: most of these villains, though fairly well cast and reasonably picturesque, merely get in the way of each other's villainy.

The only heavy who throws his weight around to any effect is the Sundance Kid (Robert Ryan, a thoroughly hissable villain). He kills a good Indian in cold blood, murders a reformed she-bandit named Cheyenne (Anne Jeffreys) when he can't persuade her to switch back into banditry, and finally meets his match in a protracted barefisted bout with the U.S. marshal (Randolph Scott) after shooting it out unsuccessfully in a lonely building. The locale: the boom town of Guthrie, and the ghost town of Braxton, just before & after the 1889 land rush into Oklahoma Territory.

The set designers and cameraman show an unusually vivid sense of period, place, mood, and the immediate, living moment. As a result, some of the picture seems to be happening for the first time, whereas the run of movies are mere illustrations of what happened in a script. But in spite of all the history that leaks in around the edges, this is essentially a routine western, easy enough to take and just as easy to let alone.

Sharpest departure from western formula: oldtimer Gabby Hayes as a bank president.

Candid Microphone (Columbia), one of the most engaging programs on the air, now makes its movie debut with a ten-minute short.

For his radio candids, Allen Funt sometimes merely plants his mike and lets nature take its course. (A charming sample: two little girls gabbling in their cribs before falling asleep.) More often he plants himself, along with the hidden mike, and gives nature a nudge--heckling an incredibly sweet-tempered piano tuner; negotiating with a girl behind a perfume counter, his pockets full of live limburger.

On the screen, Funt merely adds a hidden camera and proceeds as before. He pretends to be a hideously amateurish barber or an irreducibly bureaucratic clerk ("You got that filled out wrong, Miss"). Because the camera is stationary and the lighting natural, the scenes are crude by studio standards. But such disadvantages are more than compensated by what the audience sees and hears. Funt is a highly resourceful ad-libber, and his victims are life itself about as pure as the screen can ever catch it.

Canon City (Eagle Lion). Last winter, in the most sensational jailbreak of the year, twelve more or less desperate convicts escaped from the state penitentiary at Canon City, Colo. Within three days they were all either recaptured or killed (TIME, Jan. 12). This was a subject for a first-rate movie. Canon City is not that good, but it is exciting, intelligent and unpretentious. It begins as a straight documentary, presented with gratifying simplicity and quietness, then gently eases in among the professional players, who re-enact the break and the man hunt.

Writer-Director Crane Wilbur has concentrated on incidents in which the fugitives collide with the ordinary people who make up a community, and in which both show what they are made of. When the picture was shown to inmates of the Canon City prison recently, some of the recaptured convicts diffidently admitted that it didn't seem entirely true to life, but it is an abler and more honest try in that direction than most movies. There is impressively little hamming-up of story, and the characterizations and the danger and the suspense are unusually real and valid.

Newcomer Scott Brady (brother of Cinemactor Lawrence Tierney), who plays the most redeemable of the fugitives, has a likely future on the screen, and Mabel Paige is fine as the very frightened, very brave old woman who conks the deadliest character (well played by Jeff Corey). Warden Roy Best is unaffected and unembarrassed as Warden Roy Best.

The Babe Ruth Story (Allied Artists] is a gawking tribute to a man who deserves better. From the time the grownup Bambino (William Bendix) leaves the shelter of Brother Matthias' (Charles Bickford) industrial school and enters professional baseball, he shambles along such an interminable frieze of sobbing boys, dying dogs and disabled children (to a final, horribly protracted sickbed scene in a hospital) that the real events of Ruth's life are almost entirely crowded out. Sportwriter Sam Levene and Ruth's screen wife Claire Trevor do their level best to make up for this hokum; but even their efforts, plus Bendix's straightforward performance, do not save it.

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