The New Pictures

Royal Wedding (MGM) illustrates what is wrong with most splashy Techni-colored cinemusicals--and how entertaining they can sometimes be in spite of it.

The film lacks the pace and style of a good Broadway show (or of MGM's own On the Town). Its songs & dances serve merely as interludes in the kind of plot that cinemagoers know too well. But within these tired limits, the movie offers some amusing comedy, expert staging of individual numbers, bright lyrics by Alan Jay (Brigadoon) Lerner and, best of all, Fred Astaire who, at 51, has never danced with greater skill or ingenuity.

Ironically, Royal Wedding's plot seems no less a banal fiction for patterning itself loosely on the true story of how the famed dance team of Adele & Fred Astaire broke up. The movie's Astaire and his sister-partner (Jane Powell) are musicomedy favorites who dabble in an occasional romance, but shun matrimony on the theory that they owe themselves exclusively to their joint career. When they go to London to do a show, romance pairs Jane with a young peer (Peter Lawford) and Fred with a chorus girl (competently played by Winston Churchill's daughter, Sarah).

Lyricist Lerner's script touches up the story with such humorous byplay as a sly spoof of etiquette in a London pub on the eve of the royal wedding. It also gives Comedian Keenan Wynn a chance to shine in the double role of a brash, slang-spewing Broadway agent and the Oxford-accented twin.

Despite Actress Powell's willing energy, Astaire's best dancing partner turns out to be a clothes tree. Picking it up as a rehearsal prop, he uses it to create a little masterpiece of grace, timing and inventiveness. He scores again in two other numbers that take imaginative advantage of the screen's technical magic. In one, he hoofs all over a room's ceiling and walls; in the other, he and Partner Powell work the lurching of an ocean liner into their shipboard act. Their best number together, matching the show-stopping caliber of Astaire's clothes-tree dance, is a rowdy comic song with a title that sets some kind of record: How Can You Believe Me When I Say That I Love You When You Know I've Been a Liar All My Life?

The Groom Wore Spurs (Fidelity; Universal-International) tries to poke fun at a singing cowboy movie star (Jack Carson) who is a bit of a stinker, fears horses and cannot sing. Though the idea seems worth a farce, it is clumsily turned, geared to a creaky romance (involving Ginger Rogers as a lawyer) and powered by melodramatic nonsense. The joke proves to be not so much on western heroes as on Hollywood farceurs.

Fourteen Hours (20th Century-Fox). A suicidal young man named John Warde stood the U.S. on its ear 13 years ago when he perched all day on the 17th-floor ledge of Manhattan's Gotham Hotel before going over the edge. Inspired by Joel Sayre's New Yorker account, "The Man on the Ledge," skillful moviemakers have turned one of 1938's most exciting news events into a tense, semi-documentary drama that bids firmly for 1951 film honors.

By shooting most of the picture in Manhattan, where he restaged the Warde incident on the window ledge of a downtown building, Director Henry (The House on 92nd Street) Hathaway has packed it with authentic visual detail, taken full advantage of the variety of camera angles afforded by surrounding skyscrapers and streets. He pictures the long death watch in all its morbid excitement: the small figure hugging the wall, the police mobilization, the maneuvering of relatives and psychiatrists behind the scenes, the milling, craning mobs below.

An ingenious script by John Paxton enriches the story with meaning while leading it to a believable climax that is more dramatic than the real-life ending. The movie is just as concerned with why the would-be jumper (Richard Basehart) poises on the ledge as with whether an Irish cop (Paul Douglas) will succeed in talking him back into the hotel room. The script weaves both questions into a taut continuity unbroken by the easy device of flashbacks. The tangled causes of Base-hart's plight emerge dramatically within the action, and the script's psychiatric explanations--the curse of many a movie --prove convincingly easy to take.

The picture lightens its life-or-death tension with flashes of humor in its treatment of cops and crowds. It is somewhat less successful in two of three subplots designed to sketch varying reactions to the spectacle. One of these, showing how a woman is moved to call off her divorce, is too ambitious; another, a sidewalk romance struck up by a couple of strangers, is overdone. The third is topnotch: a group of cabbies get up a betting pool on when Basehart will jump, feel a growing sense of shame as the hours tick by.

Actors Douglas and Basehart keep right up with the fast company of excellent supporting players: Robert Keith as the young man's sheepish father; Howard da Silva as a harried deputy police commissioner; Agnes Moorehead, superb in the role of the mother who needs a psychiatrist as badly as her suicidal son.

U.S.S. Teakettle (20th Century-Fox) tackles a bright comic idea: the plight of 90-day wonders in the U.S. Navy who are baffled by a stubborn little experimental sub chaser, the PC1168.

The "ship," scornfully dubbed the U.S.S. Teakettle, carries a steam engine instead of the usual diesel, plus a big, fractious apparatus to turn sea water into fresh water for the boiler. Reserve Lieut. Gary Cooper, the reluctant choice of a war-harassed Navy, reports for duty at the ship's Norfolk mooring, gulps when he learns that he is in command. For the job of testing the new contraption, he has three equally green officers (Eddie Albert, Jack Webb, Richard Erdman), and a hardbitten, old-Navy boatswain's mate (Millard Mitchell), who is ashamed to be seen with any of them.

Steering a miserable course between harangues by the Navy brass and taunts by other crews, Cooper & Co. struggle with such problems as making the perverse little monster stop & go, and trying to remember at a bad moment how to code an SOS. Before the Navy has had enough, the Teakettle plows into an aircraft carrier, floats helplessly into submarine lanes, runs amuck in a ship-crowded, bridge-cluttered channel.

The movie oils its large-scale, mechanized slapstick with some of the camaraderie of Broadway's Mister Roberts. It also wisely recruits a key enlisted man (Harvey Lembeck) from that show's original cast. Unfortunately, the script is not up to the job of sustaining the hilarity of its idea at feature length. The picture loses pressure when repeating its shenanigans, sighs windily in romantic interludes between Cooper and his WAVE wife (Jane Greer). But more frequently, when it gets up a full head of steam, U.S.S. Teakettle bubbles with fun.

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