The New Pictures

Jolson Sings Again (Sidney Buchman; Columbia) is the predictable sequel to The Jolson Story, which three years ago became, to almost everybody's surprise, a smash boxoffice hit. The Jolson Story had wide repercussions in show business. It put the old Jolson songs of the '20s on the nation's jukeboxes. It gave Jolson himself, sixtyish and almost forgotten, new fame & fortune.

Jolson Sings Again begins prosaically enough where the first movie left off, but it soon becomes a fascinating look at Hollywood backstage. Producer Sidney Buchman gives a close explanation of how he pulled off his neatest trick--the synchronizing of Jolson's singing voice with Actor Larry Parks's gestures and lips. He has also decked out the whole exhibition with a brilliant display of soundstage techniques and gadgets. The result is a dizzy scramble of fact and fiction. In the sequences showing the filming of The Jolson Story, Larry Parks plays both himself and the "real life" Al Jolson (who remains off screen as coach and consultant).

Apart from such slippery stunts of cinemagic, Jolson Sings Again is a thumping good musical, handsomely mounted in Technicolor and zestfully played by a talented cast. The trouble is, it may launch a new and frighteningly inconclusive kind of serial. Hollywood gagsters have suggested that, 20 years hence, Columbia might do a musical entitled The Larry Parks Story, showing a young juvenile portraying Parks portraying Jolson.

Black Magic (Edward Small; United Artists) is a viscous, heady brew concocted by a Russian-born Hollywood moviemaker (Gregory Ratoff) out of a turbulent French romance (Alexandre Dumas pere's Memoirs of a Physician) about a swaggering 18th Century charlatan (the so-called Count Cagliostro). The film was made entirely in Italy at a cost of $2,000,000 (more than a billion lire). Hollywood

Impresario Edward Small, who financed it, has thrown into his bubbling cauldron practically every ingredient except newts' legs and adders' tongues.

Black Magic was clearly intended to be a superheated spellbinder. But though it boils, toils and goes to no end of trouble, it produces far more spectacles than spells. Spectacle No. i is a fair example. In the midst of a gloomy, Golgotha-like landscape, cluttered with ruffians and sinister twisted trees, a poor gypsy lad is about to be blinded with hot irons. Suddenly a portentous cruciform light appears around the torture stake, and aided by a swarm of brother gypsies, the boy escapes. Later, he grows up to be the fabulous Count Cagliostro (Orson Welles), intimate of princes and instrument of weird hypnotic powers.

Orson-Welles, no mean prestidigitator in his own right, relishes every minute of Cagliostro's swashbuckling career. Rolling his eyes like an end man in an oldtime minstrel show, he charms crippled aristocrats right off their crutches, ogles a beautiful blonde into marriage against her will, beetles and bluffs his way into the court of King Louis XV, then meets his death in a prancing duel atop a tower high above Paris, with Marie Antoinette at his side.

Between Welles and the camera hardly a trick has been left untried. At one point the screen blacks out entirely except for Welles's bulbous eyes, which go right on revolving in the dark like a couple of off-center marbles. Basking more or less uncomfortably in Welles's reflected flamboyance is a cast of thousands, headed by Nancy Guild, Valentina Cortesa, Akim Tamiroff and Stephen Bekassy, and draped in 70 million lire worth of costumes. As a brutal assertion of quantity over quality Black Magic exerts a kind of hypnotic fascination; otherwise it is chiefly remarkable as a triumph of matter over mind.

Slattery's Hurricane (20th Century-Fox) pins a Hollywood medal on an unsung specialty of the armed forces, U.S. naval aviation's hurricane-tracking service off the Florida coast. But it is the same old celluloid medal--thin, transparent and chipped with wear.

True to cinemilitary tradition, the film shows how crisis and the call of duty can regenerate the most cynical heel. As the heel, Richard Widmark sinks so low that only something as drastic as a hurricane can wash his sins away. A Naval Reserve pilot, he flies a plane for dope smugglers. In his spare time he drinks intemperately, cruelly casts off his sweetheart (Veronica Lake) and makes passes at the wife (Linda Darnell) of an old Navy buddy (John Russell).

By the time the hurricane comes along to give Widmark a crack at heroic redemption (and to blow some fresh air onto the screen), it is too late to redeem the film from a dead calm of dimly motivated banalities.

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