The New Pictures

Born to Be Bad (RKO Radio) casts Joan Fontaine as a wicked lady with kittenish airs and tigerish aspirations. Radiating sweet innocence, she connives to steal the wealthy fiance (Zachary Scott) of her friend (Joan Leslie). Meantime she enjoys a carnal fling with an author (Robert Ryan), who cannot resist, even while recognizing her as "a cross between Lucrezia Borgia and Peg 0' My Heart."

Joan's maneuvers are so crudely plotted that they would not fool an adolescent boy. Under Nicholas Ray's solemnly pretentious direction, she gives a performance overloaded with her familiar coy mannerisms: the averted gaze, the fluttering eyelids, the puckered eyebrows. Ryan's hard-breathing passion seems strangely misspent, and Scott performs like a man born to be had, especially when forced to read such deadpan lines as: "I gave up everything for [her]--my golf, my tennis, my work."

My Blue Heaven (20th Century-Fox] is Hollywood's first backstage musical with a television setting. Technically, the movie takes the liberty of working a minor miracle: its TV sets deliver crisp, Technicolored images of polished production numbers. Aside from that, it is not much better than the kind of entertainment that may waste a televiewer's time any night of the week.

The film strews song & dance routines irrelevantly through a sticky, inappropriate plot about a childless couple's longing for babies. Between TV numbers by the man & wife team of Betty Grable and Dan Dailey, the script seems to putter endlessly with their domestic problems: a miscarriage, an adoption, a black-market baby deal, a kidnaping and a couple of pregnancies.

This tasteless hodge-podge taxes the limited talents of Actress Grable, embarrasses the usually engaging Dailey and misuses David Wayne and Jane Wyatt in supporting roles. The dancing and singing of a pert brunette newcomer named Mitzi Gaynor turns out to be the brightest spot in the show. Rarely far from it, the picture hits rock bottom with a number called The Friendly Islands. Supposedly a take-off on South Pacific, it consists of Dailey's mimicry of Ezio Pinza's basso voice, plus some witless antics that have nothing remotely to do with the Broadway show. No one need bother to parody My Blue Heaven.

Madeleine (J. Arthur Rank). Did 21-year-old Madeleine Smith murder her French lover by slipping arsenic into his cocoa? The Glasgow jurors who heard her trial in 1857 returned a verdict peculiar to Scottish law: "Not proven." That gave Madeleine her freedom.* But the verdict left the question wide open to serious chroniclers, Sunday supplement writers and half a dozen novelists and playwrights. Most of them have found Madeleine Smith guilty. British Director David (Brief Encounter) Lean's film, off on a different tack, leaves the question to the audience.

In most respects, Madeleine is a brilliant job of moviemaking, but a disappointing movie. It succeeds in making the crime a tantalizing enigma--which in itself may leave some cinemagoers feeling cheated--at the cost of making its leading character too enigmatic to invite either sympathy or censure. Madeleine (Ann Todd) seems inadequately drawn, inconsistent and unreal. The story's conflicts grow out of hidebound Victorian conventions, and these are pictured so stiffly, e.g., in the character of Leslie Banks as Madeleine's priggish father, that some of the situations resemble showboat melodrama.

Fortunately, Director Lean's sure technique keeps most of the picture crackling, and the Nicholas Phipps-Stanley Haynes script gives him plenty to work with. His camera angles make a pair of cocoa cups enormously intriguing, endow the villain's silver-knobbed cane with a menacing, meaningful life of its own. He cuts back & forth between the lovers and shots of a frenetic Scottish reel to give a seduction scene a surprisingly erotic effect. His trial sequence, neatly dovetailing flashbacks of testimony into the lawyers' summations, is a fresh, economical way to film courtroom action. Many a moviegoer may find Director Lean's storytelling entertaining enough to divert attention from the weaknesses of the story.

A Life of Her Own (MGM) brings Lana Turner back to the movies after a two-year absence -- and may make her wish she had stayed away longer. The film is an old-fashioned tearjerker about the eternal triangle and a woman's sacrifice, played to the interminable accompaniment of caterwauling cellos.

The life Lana takes for her own begins in Kansas, soon moves to Manhattan where she becomes U.S. model No. 1. But there is a gap in her life, and Ray Milland, a married mining engineer, comes along to fill it. After they have lived for three months in sin (but with utter devotion, of course), Milland tells her that his wife is an invalid and is on her way to New York. Lana hits the bottle, can't sleep, demands a showdown with Milland's loving wife (Margaret Phillips) and finds she cannot go through with it. Bravely, the lovers decide that they must part.

Such a leading role might be the despair of a skilled actress; for Lana Turner, it is a disaster. Looking less svelte than chunky, she fails even to make the heroine attractive. Milland is a portrait of acute discomfort, and such able players as Tom Ewell and Louis Calhern squeak by in lesser assignments. Wasted in her first movie role, Broadway's Actress Phillips (The Cocktail Party) plays in a wheelchair, but walks away with every scene in which she appears.

*She eventually went to the U.S., where she lived to the age of 92, protesting her innocence to the end.

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