The New Pictures

The Window (RKO Radio) gives a modest but impressive view of how well Hollywood can do, if it tries, on a grade B budget (under $750,000). One of the last jobs done for RKO by Executive Producer Dore Schary before he joined MGM, it combines a neat story by Cornell Woolrich, competent playing by twelve-year-old Bobby Driscoll and four relatively unknown actors, and some expert camera work in the brownstone jungles of Manhattan's East Side tenements. Smoothly mortised and joined by Director Ted Tetzlaff and Producer Frederic Ullman Jr., The Window emerges as a fast little thriller full of grade A qualities.

The suspense begins to build up when Tommy (Bobby Driscoll), a tenement kid with a habit of telling tall tales, sees a murder. When he tells his sober, hardworking parents (Barbara Hale and Arthur Kennedy), they do not believe him; neither do the police. But the murderers (Paul Stewart and Ruth Roman) get wind of Tommy's knowledge and decide to rub him out.

Much of the film is a hair-raising chase by night which ends up in a fire-gutted tenement. As the camera stalks hunter & hunted about the shadowy ruins, the suspense is drawn out to a fine edge. An intelligent sound track, all ears, brings it to a razor sharpness. When Bobby is finally cornered on a giant rafter, overhanging the gaping cellar, the rotted wood starts giving way. What follows is a breathless, well-executed collaboration between lens and microphone.

Director Tetzlaff has cannily short-circuited the improbabilities of the script by documentary-like handling of Bobby's home and environment. Bobby, particularly in his moments of open-mouthed terror, is a reminder that child cinemactors can be used effectively for other things than wringing hearts and tears.

The Lady Gambles (Paramount) gets off to a shocking start with a handsomely photographed sequence showing Barbara Stanwyck taking a brutal beating in a murky underground passage. Barbara's crap-shooting friends have just caught her with a pair of loaded dice.

Like the unfortunate hero in Dostoevsky's The Gambler, Miss Stanwyck is essentially a decent person consumed by a hopeless passion for pitting the probable against the possible. Her downfall begins during a brief visit to Las Vegas, where she meets a suave professional gambler (Stephen McNally) and takes her first innocent fling at roulette. While her journalist husband (Robert Preston) is busy on an assignment, she takes a few more flings. By this time Barbara is a goner. Eventually she loses a wrestling match with her moral scruples, gambles away the family savings, and runs off in shame to join forces with Gambler McNally.

Lady pictures the how of a gambler's obsession with a good deal of plausibility. Especially skillful are Barbara Stanwyck's hard-breathing, glitter-eyed performance at the gaming tables, and Russell Metty's feverish camera work in & out of the neon-lighted dens of Las Vegas. The story gets added strength from Stephen McNally's interpretation of a gambler who, for once, appears to be an intelligent character.

When it comes to the why of Barbara's plight, however, the movie goes rapidly to pieces. Like most Hollywood efforts to pin Freudian labels on human weakness, this one clutters a fairly reasonable plot with murky gibberish.

Red Canyon (Universal-International), a Technicolored horse opera, is not appreciably different from dozens of other westerns currently galloping around the neighborhood circuits. In a rambling, inconsequential fashion, it tells the story of a reformed, horse-loving outlaw (Howard Duff) who meets up with the pretty daughter (Ann Blyth) of a rich, horse-racing rancher (George Brent). Howard is out to capture a wild horse. Ann, despite some flimsy pretenses to the contrary, is bent on catching a tame husband. After a good deal of shooting, roping and racing, and without offending either the S.P.C.A. or the Johnston Office, both of them get what they are after.

Short on plot, Canyon is long on curry-combs and pancake. Most of the principals, both two-legged and four-legged, look as sleek and dustless as the population of a dude ranch. To give their implausible doings a sagebrush flavor, the dialogue is spiked with labored cracker-barrel idioms, e.g., Ann is "pretty as a blue-nosed trout," another character as "crazy as popcorn on a hot stove." No one but the popcorn addicts and the very young will mistake Canyon for anything but a dull movie.

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