The New Pictures

They Live by Night (RKO Radio) is a sleeper, i.e., a low-budget job that surprises its makers by being a hit. It has had a delayed release in the U.S. after making a reputation for itself in England. Except for its sentimental view of crooks, it is a well-made little crime movie flavored with poetic young love.

Director Nicholas (Knock on Any Door) Ray has succeeded in breathing some new life into his hackneyed plot. An escaped lifer (Farley Granger) and his girl (Cathy O'Donnell) hopelessly try to filter through a police dragnet. As their flight zigzags through central Texas, they get their first good view of the world and their first happiness in it. Only rarely, e.g., in a morning shot of Cathy purring glamorously in bed, do they act in tried and untrue Hollywood style. As usual in a cross-country chase, the movie spots its young folks in a grubby motel, a Greyhound bus and a cabaret, but They Live by Night handles them with realistic kid gloves. Cathy sometimes combs a too-pretty hairdo, but mostly the pair act like nice, believable high-school kids.

Moralists may squirm at the fact that the lovers, while longing for a less dangerous life, seem to feel no guilt over their lawbreaking. They take real pleasure in the comforts gained by Granger's cut of a bank robbery and budget their ill-gotten hoard as if they had slaved for it. Working on the notion that bank robbers are a likable lot among themselves and get the same pleasure out of their work as any other skilled craftsmen, Director Ray and Scriptwriter Charles Schnee have served up some fine, entertaining scenes. Their best characters: Howard Da Silva as a one-eyed lush who is outraged over the skimpy newspaper coverage of his bank robberies, and Jay C. Flippen as a hardened robber who has to work overtime to support a sister-in-law and buy his brother out of the pen.

Adam's Rib (MGM) again presents Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy as the ideal U.S. Mr. & Mrs. of upper-middle income. This time, besides being wittily urbane, both are lawyers. The determined deadpan whimsicality of their relationship is indicated by the fact that he calls her Pinkie and she calls him Pinky. Hepburn's elegantly arranged bones and Tracy's assurance as an actor make them worth looking at in any movie, but the stars are called on for some aggressive cuteness in this one. Item: during a courtroom duel between them, Pinky is forever dropping a pencil so that he can ogle Pinkie's legs and exchange intimate messages with her under the counsel table.

The story, fashioned by Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon: a frowsy blonde (Judy Holliday) trails her husband (Tom Ewell) to his girl friend's apartment and shoots him, but not fatally. The rest of the movie follows the trial of the assault case in court. Attorney Tracy is defending a husband's right to philander; Attorney Hepburn is fighting for a woman's right to shoot an adulterous husband.

Adam's Rib is acted as though the players found it funny, but actually, like many "sophisticated" movie comedies, it is more absurd than comical. Its chief asset: a high-toned song called Farewell, Amanda, with dismal lyrics which Cole Porter must have written while waiting for a bus.

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