The New Pictures

Kim (M-G-M), a lushly Technicolored version of the Rudyard Kipling adventure novel, will tempt small boys to trade in their Hopalong Cassidy duds for a turban, a walnut-stained complexion and a British Secret Service mission in the Empire's wild East of 1885. Like Treasure Island's Jim Hawkins, Kipling's spunky little hero reigns in a world of outsmarted adults. More than that, Kim (ably played by Dean Stockwell) comes equipped with swashbuckling dash, a guttersnipe's invective and a taste for fine cigars.

Kipling's red-blooded hokum comes to the screen almost intact, lacks nothing for juvenile excitement except possibly a lancer charge or two. As Mahbub Ali, the Red Beard, Errol Flynn dallies with some dusky harem girls, but the script steers mercifully clear of a love story, and even Flynn takes a back seat to the boy. Kim is still the India-born British orphan who has grown up as a sun-bleached native urchin in the clutter of Lahore. His best friends: a wandering Tibetan lama (Paul Lukas) and Horse Trader Flynn, who doubles as a spy. Recognized by the British, who pack him off to a pukka school, Kim plays hooky, picks up some tutoring in espionage and pits his wits against the Russians who are stirring up trouble on the other side of the Khyber Pass.

Most of Kim's backgrounds (and some of its action) were filmed in India, and M-G-M technicians have done an expert job of blending the studio scenes into the location footage. While the screen overflows with exotic local color, the soundtrack matches its extravagance with Kipling's quaint version of the Indian idiom. Even grownups who are dragged off to see Kim are likely to have no regrets.

Rio Grande (Argosy; Republic] continues the descent of Director John Ford into his latter-day role as scourge of thd redskin and glorifier of the U.S. Cavalry. The Rover-boy characters, the conflict of love v. duty, the boisterous comic relief, the cavalry charges and screeching Indian raids are all here, set against the well-photographed buttes and plains of what used to be God's country before Ford took it over.

The story may be a vacuum, but Ford's accountants know that it sucks in quick box-office receipts (see above), especially when John Wayne plays the leathery colonel and Maureen O'Hara is his estranged (but not for long) lady. Ford's thoroughgoing craftsmanship, especially in his cleanly planned battle sequences, often invigorates Rio Grande. But it no longer quite makes up for his shoddy taste in material, nor can it satisfy moviegoers who remember him as the director of The Informer and The Grapes of Wrath.

The Milkman (Universal-International) is a cheerful little musicomedy without enough ingenuity to support its good intentions. It has a droll notion of treating milkmen as an elite corps with pride, traditions and loyalties roughly approximating those of the U.S. Military Academy. Jimmy Durante cuts a fine figure of a milkman's milkman, and Recruit Donald O'Connor burns to win the right to take his girl strolling down Buttermilk Lane (the dairy's Flirtation Walk).

Wholly unpretentious, the movie goes in & out of its four musical numbers without labored cues or excuses, relies on bouncy tunes and the simple showmanship of Durante and O'Connor instead of costly production routines. The plot is nonsense, and The Milkman's four scripters have tried to-use it wherever possible as a springboard for visual comedy in the silent-movie tradition. Unfortunately, the effort too often is no more inventive than the second-rate dialogue that overburdens Comedian Durante. The picture brightens considerably whenever the sight gags pay off, e.g., Durante cooking the breakfast eggs, toast and coffee on an electric blanket.

Breakthrough (Warner) travels with a rifle platoon of the ist Infantry Division into the Normandy invasion, the hedgerow fighting and the Saint-Lo battle that launched the Allied blitz through France. From Twelve O'Clock High it borrows the problem of the commander who cracks under the strain of identifying himself with his men; from Battleground, the familiar roster of civilian-soldier types; from Sands of Iwo Jima, the technique of intercutting its scenes liberally with real combat footage and battering its sound track with thunderous explosions.

The scent of grease paint proves much stronger than the smell of cordite. All the fog of war cannot hide the writing and acting shortcomings in the characters of the picture's command-weary captain (David Brian) and his young platoon leader (John Agar). Unlike Battleground, which it most resembles, Breakthrough makes no bones about recruiting its soldiers from Central Casting and assigning them to spell the carnage with a few vaudeville turns. One infantryman is a vaudevillian who does imitations of movie stars; another is a musclebound health faddist whose casual rejection of a man-eating mademoiselle's advances comes straight out of Li'l Abner.

While feigning a respectable amount of civilized horror at the exigencies of battle, Breakthrough romanticizes the hell out of war. On the level of a shoot-'em-up action film with some coincidental resemblance to the events it pretends to depict, it is a well-staged, workmanlike job. As any kind of memorial to the men who died in its newsreel clips, it is a great deal less.

Three Husbands (United Artists] stencils itself hopefully on 1949's successful A Letter to Three Wives. Based on a story by Novelist Vera Caspary, who worked on the plot for Three Wives, the picture gives three men (Howard da Silva, Shepperd Strudwick, Robert Karnes) reason to suspect their wives (Eve Arden, Ruth Warrick, Vanessa Brown) of infidelity, then sits back to watch them squirm.

Like its predecessor, Three Husbands tells its story in episodic flashbacks, straightens out its tangled problems with a surprise twist--which comes now as not much of a surprise. The movie suffers not only from familiarity but from lack of the characterization, humorous bite and thoughtful undertones that lifted the earlier film out of the ruck.

By reworking most of the old jokes on cuckoldry and keeping the slapstick busy, the picture provides some mild amusement. Its single innovation proves its saving grace: the pivotal character who causes all the trouble is no disembodied voice this time but a quite fleshly rogue, played with jaunty elegance by Britain's Actor-Playwright Emlyn (Night Must Fall) Williams.

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