The New Pictures

Mystery Street (MGM) is a low-budget melodrama without box-office stars or advance ballyhoo. It does not pretend to do much more than tell a straightaway, logical story of scientific crime detection. Within such modest limits, Director John Sturges* and Scripters Sydney Boehm and Richard Brooks have treated the picture with such taste and craftsmanship that it is just about perfect.

The audience soon knows the identity of Mystery Street's murderer, but the police have only one clue: the victim's skeleton on a Cape Cod beach. In absorbing, plausible detail, the movie shows how a policeman (Ricardo Montalban) works exhaustively to follow up the findings of a Harvard medical specialist (Bruce Bennett). After poking among the bones, the doctor deduces the victim's age, sex, occupation, the date and cause of death and --by matching a set of photographs with the skull--even a name and address.

All the performers seem to be working on the theory that there should be no difference in quality between a B picture and its budgetary betters. Montalban is natural and likable as an eager small-town detective on his first big case; Sally Forrest plays the role of the wrong suspect's wife for all it is worth, and Elsa Lanchester is a delight as a snooping, gin-drinking landlady with genteel airs.

Our Very Own (Samuel Goldwyn; RKO Radio), coming out foursquare in favor of the U.S. home and family, sets up what may be the most piercing din of twanging heartstrings since Stella Dallas.

In telling the story of the Macaulays, "a typical U.S. family," Producer Sam Goldwyn has spared nothing to make them typical of Hollywood: a home out of Rouse Beautiful, two cars, a servant and elegant wardrobes. To keep his teen-aged heroine (Ann Blyth) and her younger sisters (Joan Evans and Natalie Wood) just as true to type, Goldwyn got the scripting services of F. Hugh (Kiss and Tell) Herbert, the Boswell of the suburban bobbysoxer.

Heroine Ann, happy, secure and in love with her boy friend (Farley Granger), is looking forward to her high-school graduation and a summer job. Then everything seems to crumble as Sister Joan, in a fit of envy, lets slip the guarded news that Ann is an adopted child. Her parents (Donald Cook and Jane Wyatt) had never got around to telling her. Ann rejects them, her sisters and her beau, sulks and suffers until a disillusioning meeting with her real mother (Ann Dvorak) helps her to realize her adopted family's true worth.

Much the best thing in the picture is the anguish and suspense of the sequence in which the girl goes to the wrong side of the tracks to see her mother for the first time. As the mother, curious and eager to see her child but desperately anxious to keep the girl's existence a secret from her husband, veteran Actress Dvorak gives a sure, touching performance. Apart from these scenes, the movie is as slick, sugary and shallow as cake icing.

711 Ocean Drive (Columbia] is a gangster melodrama unconvincingly disguised as a documentary crusade against an $8-billion-a-year gambling racket. It was filmed, say its pressagents, under threats of violence from the underworld and with the protection of police. It begins with an endorsement by Wisconsin's Republican Senator Alexander Wiley, hailing it for informing the public "of the meaning of that innocent $2 bet at the candy stand." One point in the picture's favor: it is full of interesting electronic gadgets (e.g., walkie-talkies, relay amplifiers) illustrating the illegal transmission of betting information from the race tracks.

The documentary flavor, however, lends too little novelty to the story's rehash of familiar fiction; and for all its self-righteous airs, the movie does not practice what it preaches. The point of the action seems to be that a smart, ambitious telephone repairman (Edmond O'Brien) can cut himself in on the $8 billion if he applies his knowledge to the gambling racket. By hook, crook and electronics, Hero O'Brien works himself up to a high living standard, 36 changes of clothes and a love affair with another big shot's blue-blooded wife (Joanne Dru).

Then he overreaches himself, gets involved in double-crossing and murder, makes an enemy of the national gambling syndicate's gracious, cultured boss (Otto Kruger). The moral: crime pays handsomely, but greed does not.

Peggy (Universal-International) is a great waste of costly Technicolor and able actors. It sacrifices such good comedy performers as Charles Coburn and Charlotte Greenwood to a humorless, embarrassingly juvenile farce about the efforts of a professor's daughter (Diana Lynn) to escape coronation as queen of the Rose Bowl. For colored-postcard enthusiasts who sit it out, the last reel offers some views of Pasadena's Tournament of Roses.

* No kin to Scripter-Producer-Director Preston Sturges.

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