The New Pictures

September Affair (Paramount), a slick product for a ready market, is just what a cynic might arrive at if he tried to imagine how Hollywood would have made Britain's 1946 Brief Encounter. Like the British picture, September Affair tells a wistfully ro mantic story of a couple thrown together into what readers of women's-magazine fiction know as a love that can never be.

Brief Encounter set the story in a London suburb, told it plausibly and sensitively. Its plain, conscience-smitten lovers each nearing respectably married middle age, could never enjoy their unglamorous fun as much as they suffered their pathetic frustration. September Affair's lovers (Joan Fontaine and Joseph Gotten) have wealth, good looks, talent and an itinerary that covers Naples, Rome, Florence and the isle of Capri. They come close to eating their cake and having it too.

The Fontaine-Gotten affair 'is thrust upon them by a plot gimmick, as if it were fate. Strangers on a plane that stops in Naples for repairs, they miss its departure while sightseeing. The plane crashes. Listed as dead, they are free to make a new life far from Cotten's wife (Jessica Tandy) and son. For a while, until the past (and the Production Code) catches up with the lovers, life becomes an idyl in a palazzo. Renunciation finally comes not so much from themselves as from the prodding of other characters.

On its own lower level, September Affair has been turned out with as much skill as Brief Encounter. The plot meshes smoothly, the dialogue is suavely written and spoken, the score puts Kurt Weill's lovely September Song to good sentimental use, and a soft haze of glamor rises from lavish interiors and antiseptically romantic Italian vistas. The effect is as shimmeringly pretty as a soap bubble, and just as hollow.

The Enforcer (Warner) puts Humphrey Bogart on the side of the law, as an assistant district attorney, and pits him against a gang of racketeers inspired by Murder, Inc. The picture opens with a lecture by Tennessee's Estes Kefauver, head of the Senate's crime investigators. What follows is no social document, but a gory round of killings by ice pick, razor, butcher knife, pistol.

On the eve of the big trial, Bogart's chief witness plunges out the window to his death. The assistant D. A. pores over the record of the case to dig out a clue to another witness. The camera goes back with him, introducing one hoodlum after another. As each tells his own story, the movie backtracks again to picture it. Bogart finds his clue just in time for a wham-bam finish.

The skillful script keeps the story moving through the maze of flashbacks within flashbacks. Each violent episode, well milked of its own suspense, falls into a place where it counts most in building tension for the whole movie. The murder retailers do such a big business over such a short period that the picture gets a bit silly when it ought to be chilling. But it never gets dull. The thugs (notably Ted de Corsia, Zero Mostel, Everett Sloane) are well cast and played. Even Tough Guy Bogart, in a role happily without romantic attachments, seems shocked by the lethal goings-on.

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