The New Pictures

Little Women (MGM) is Hollywood's second try at exploiting Louisa May Alcott's genteel, durable New England tearjerker. A shade less ambitious than its 1933 predecessor (which starred Katharine Hepburn and Joan Bennett), it still jerks tears with easy efficiency.

This time the four hoopskirted March girls are played by blonde June Allyson (Jo) in a red wig, brunette Elizabeth Taylor (Amy) in a blonde wig, Janet Leigh (Meg), and Margaret O'Brien (Beth). Though the faces have changed, the girlish flutter and flummery are still the same. Curled up in her cluttered Concord attic, tousle-headed Jo still writes, and weeps over her blood & thunder fiction. The romantic Meg still falls romantically in love, marries and has twins. Featherbrained Amy, as self-centered as ever and still suffering from the "degradations" of well-bred poverty, succeeds in catching wealthy Laurie (Peter Lawford). Little Beth once more wastes away, bravely and wistfully, to an early death.

After 80 years of circulation in one form or another, this gentle New England story in its latest version has few surprises. One of them is Producer-Director Mervyn LeRoy's success in bringing to life once more the faded sentiments and the tintyped situations. Another is June Allyson's playing of tomboy Jo. She has a refreshing breeziness and bounce which make the old tale believable and now & then lift it right out of its tatted frame. Other notable performances are Margaret O'Brien's delicate, peaked portrayal of ailing Beth, and the supporting work of veterans Mary Astor (Marmee), the late Sir C. Aubrey Smith and Lucille Watson. The whole package is so richly wrapped in romantic period sets and costumes that the final shot is unnecessary: a pastel, picture-postcard rainbow rises out of the subsiding suds and sentiments to arch the happy ending.

The Sun Comes Up (MGM) is an unsuccessful attempt, in Technicolor, to recapture the magic formula which made a hit of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' The Yearling (TIME, Jan. 13, 1947). The story was written by Novelist Rawlings, the lead is again played by Claude Jarman Jr. and Lassie is in the cast to handle the heart tugs supplied by a fawn in the first picture. The second venture, obviously intended to be a natural, is as unnatural as a purple zebra.

There is some pathos in the stffry of a widowed concert singer (Jeanette MacDonald) who sees her only son hit and killed by a truck, but the sentiment sours when the scripters make Jeanette a self-centered, self-pitying woman. There is also some promise in the relationship between the singer and an orphan boy (Jarman) whom she meets in the Carolina Mountains. But the association never quite comes off. For one thing, young Jarman is uncomfortably overgrown and incurably quaint, and he is pictured as a ninny. Perhaps the only character to live up to expectations is the general storekeeper (Percy Kilbride). Lassie also makes the best of a dog's life.

Knock on Any Door (Santana; Columbia) carries an earnest but wobbly torch for a familiar social message. It also carries the imprint of a new independent called Santana Productions, partly owned by Humphrey Bogart. For his first effort as a producer, Bogart chose Willard Motley's bestselling novel, put Director Nicholas Ray to work behind the cameras, then walked around in front of the lens into the leading role.

He also walked into some serious trouble. As a successful lawyer who has never forgotten his own slum-scarred boyhood, Bogart agrees to defend Nick "Pretty Boy" Romano (John Derek), a young hoodlum charged with killing a cop. Bogart has known "Pretty Boy" for years, mistakenly believes him innocent, and blames society for the boy's criminal ways. To prove his point to the jury, he tells, in flashbacks, the sordid story of Romano's life. In the telling, Veteran Bogart inevitably displaces young Newcomer Derek as the real center of interest.

The flashbacks of life in the slums are too thin and diffuse to flesh out a convincing killer or a solid case for society's guilt.

By the time "Pretty Boy" breaks down on the stand and sobs out his confession, moviegoers are likely to conclude that the electric chair is just what he deserves.

As social propaganda Knock on Any Door is very nearly a dud. But with the rage, sweat, rhetoric and kinetic screen personality of Lawyer Bogart to pull it together, it becomes in the last few reels a fairly exciting courtroom drama.

Alias Nick Beal (Paramount) is a modern morality play subtly fashioned around the text: "What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" Into the life of a gang-busting prosecutor (Thomas Mitchell) floats a mysterious character known as Nick Beal (Ray Milland). At first Beal supplies the prosecutor with evidence against a big-time gambler; then he stands at the lawyer's elbow, goading his political ambitions. By the time Mitchell has been persuaded to play ball with a corrupt, vote-powerful political machine, it is clear that his sly, satanic ally called Beal is really Beelzebub.

Bedazzled by his own lust for power and for a woman, Mitchell eventually loses the ability to say "Get thee behind me, Satan." Shedding his wife, his honest friends and his self-respect as he wins the governorship, Lawyer Mitchell is on the point of delivering himself for shipment to hell, but his better nature triumphs in the end. The happy ending is scarcely a surprise, but Director John Farrow leads up to it with a series of small shocks, and neat twists. He appears to have the exhilarating conviction that man-meets-devil can be as interesting as boy-meets-girl. The fine sardonic dialogue of Jonathan Latimer's screen play is a great help, and so are devilish good performances by Milland and Mitchell.

The Life of Riley (Universal-International) may be an ominous preview of the day when more & more radio soap operas will be seen on television. For four years, a sharp-eyed young man named Irving Brecher has produced Riley, a radio show about one of those homey American families that persist in radio scripters' minds. Now he has put the program's star (William Bendix) and a cast of actors into an untidy little movie made up of short episodes and an endless crescendo of gags.

Bendix plays a morose, bumbleheaded factory hand with a careful blend of "bathos, confusion and corny humor. His enemy is his landlady (Beulah Bondi); his daughter is being courted by the boss's son and the landlady's nephew; his old pals (including Jimmy Gleason) scorn him when he gets to be an executive, but welcome him back to the fold when it turns out that his daughter won't marry the boss's son after all. Even a character named "Digger" O'Dell, an undertaker with a morgue full of morbid jokes, is not out of place in Bendix' parlor. Moviegoers may wish they had stayed at home around the radio, where someone could keep a hand on the tuning knob.

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