The New Pictures

The Great Gatsby (Paramount] might have been a fine picture. F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel had almost everything a moviemaker could ask for: a strong love story, natural dialogue, an emotional climate as supercharged with violence as a summer storm, and a sensitive perception of period and place. Unfortunately, the movie version misses many of its opportunities.

The story of Jay Gatsby--World War I hero, millionaire bootlegger, and misguided idealist--is the story of a fabulous epoch, the 1920s. As Fitzgerald told it, it was also a spiritual history of those young Americans who from disillusionment, boredom, or the simple sense of belonging nowhere and to nothing, called themselves the "lost generation." The story of the movie is largely a story of bad casting. In the role of Gatsby, which calls for extraordinary warmth and a wide range of mood, Alan Ladd looks about as comfortable as a gunman at a garden party. Betty Field, though she gives a finished performance as the poor little rich girl Gatsby loves, is subtly wrong for the part. The players who come closest to Fitzgerald's lost souls are Howard da Silva and Shelley Winters as a cuckold and his wayward wife.

Gatsby tries hard, in some respects, to be a good movie. Its musical score, costumes and sets show painstaking research and a kind of wistful desire to be true to the novel. In individual scenes, in fact, Elliott Nugent's shrewd direction achieves an illusion of complete authenticity. But there are signs aplenty of heavyhanded tampering and cutting, and an unconscionable distortion of the novel's tone and intention. Like most second-rate copies, Gatsby captures much of the detail, but defaults on the grand design.

Any Number Can Play (MGM) sets out to prove that gambling is a true test of character. If it is, the hero (Clark Gable) is pure gold. Owner of a legal gambling establishment, Gable is devoted to his wife (Alexis Smith) and his only son Paul (Darryl Hickman). He potters about his cluttered middle-class cellar like any respectable family man, and, like many a middle-aged business executive, nurses a bad heart and frustrated hopes for a fishing trip. Above all, he is "a nut for human dignity" (as one of his employees puts it) and always has a kind word and a fistful of bills for the men he has ruined.

Eventually teen-aged Paul, who thinks Dad is a stinker, pays his first visit to the gaming tables and sees Dad give a demonstration of character. Coolly and courteously, Gable stakes the entire family fortune on a throw of dice--and wins. That is enough for Paul. As a couple of gunmen close in on the swag, Paul springs to his father's side, a true blue chip off the old block.

Director Mervyn LeRoy has tried halfheartedly to keep the suds from showing, but soap opera, like murder, will out.

The Girl from Jones Beach (Warner) turns out to be blonde Virginia Mayo, a high-minded schoolteacher with a photogenic figure and a low I.Q. in matters of romance. To Ronald Reagan, a New York commercial artist, she looks like the perfect model for the perfect cover girl. To Eddie Bracken, a down-at-heels promoter, she looks like the promise of a fat commission if she can be teamed with Reagan in a television act. The problem: to persuade highbrow Miss Mayo to lend herself to such a lowbrow enterprise.

The only real fun to be had from the belaboring of this plot comes from Ronald Reagan, who rarely gets a crack at light comedy. He does a good job of giving some old gags a new gloss; and masquerading as an immigrant student in one of Schoolmarm Mayo's naturalization classes, he gets off an excellent range of muddled European accents. Brightest piece of invention: a bit of hot-weather Americana, in which the sound track picks up the nasal lovemaking of a Brooklyn couple in the moonlit shadows of Jones Beach.

The Big Steal (RKO Radio) is a melodrama with some real assets: 1) it was handsomely photographed against handsome Mexican backgrounds; 2) it has one of the fastest and longest chases of the current season; 3) it never once pauses long enough to draw a serious breath.

Most of the chase takes place on wheels. In the first automobile is a sleek stickup man (Patric Knowles) who has absconded with a fat U.S. Army payroll. Close behind come an Army lieutenant (Robert Mitchum) and a mysterious young woman (Jane Greer). In the third car is Mitchum's superior officer (William Bendix). Trailing far behind at a leisurely Latin pace is Ramon Novarro, a sly Mexican police official who, like the audience, is trying his best to figure out the turns & twists of the plot.

In fleeting moments, the cockeyed speed of the chase recalls the wonderful jet-propelled jalopies of the old silent comedies. Not half so effective as comic relief is the stock, bug-eyed mugging of William Bendix. One of the best things in the film is the shy, incredulous expressions of the Mexican extras.

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