Also Showing

The Secret of Convict Lake (20th Century-Fox) leads five escaped convicts through a mountain blizzard and into an isolated valley inhabited only by the womenfolk and children of some absent gold prospectors. In this suspenseful setting for a war between the sexes, the women at first have the advantage of guns, mobility and an able, if ailing, leader in Ethel Barrymore. Restricted to a single cabin and kept indoors by the threat of a well-handled rifle, the convicts use the sickness of one of their number, a fire in a stable and the way of a man with a maid to break the feminine ranks.

But after this promising start, Convict Lake turns into a routine western, with Convict Glenn Ford gunning for the man who framed him and being reformed by the love of a good woman (Gene Tierney). When the prospectors come back over the mountain, the stage is set for a good deal of indiscriminate bloodletting during which Ford gets his man and inherits his girl, and one of the convicts, Rapist Richard Hylton, is pitchforked to death by the aroused women.

Peking Express (Hal Wallis; Paramount) sets out on a topical excursion into Communist China, but quickly turns into a typical train-borne melodrama, running on the same tracks as 1932's Shanghai Express. For all its world-shaking airs and its batting around of ideological platitudes, the picture carries (and is carried by) the standard load of sinister passengers scheming at cross-purposes, and the hero's burp gun has the last word.

Among the passengers: an idealistic doctor (Joseph Cotten) on a mission for the U.N.'s World Health Organization, a somewhat shopworn adventuress (Corinne Calvet), a Roman Catholic priest (Edmund Gwenn), an arrogant Chinese Communist journalist, an oily war lord (Marvin Miller), who plays ball with the Reds while enriching himself on the black market in U.N. medical supplies, and his estranged wife, a Nationalist sympathizer.

While Cotten busily talks up the virtues of democracy, War Lord Miller stabs his wife, orders his uniformed bandits to stop the train and seize the passengers as hostages, shoots stray characters in the back, tortures the journalist with a hot iron, and earmarks Corinne for what was regarded in some circles, back in the days when this plot was young, as the fate worse than death. In the carnage that rights these wrongs, Peking Express seems to prove only that human life in this type of melodrama is almost as cheap as in China itself.

On Moonlight Bay (Warner) is a folksy period musical somewhat casually adapted from the Penrod stories of Booth Tarkington, whose Seventeen is currently a Broadway musicomedy. Set in an innocent, brightly colored Indiana during World War I, the picture is strictly summer-weight material--thin, porous and not at all wrinkleproof, but comfortably loose and light.

Tarkington's beloved small-boy fiend, no longer even called Penrod, takes a back seat in this script to his teen-age sister (Doris Day), a tomboy in the process of discovering that romance can be even more fun than baseball. Doris is wooed by a dull, respectable type (Jack Smith), who has the approval of her banker-father (Leon Ames), and by an Indiana University senior (Gordon MacRae), who, bursting with collegiate radicalism, rather thinks that all banks ought to be blown up. Further complication is provided by the pesky kid brother (Billy Gray), who still gets out of scrapes by getting his family into them, e.g., he wins the sympathy of an angry teacher by confiding that papa is really a secret drinker.

Despite its familiarity, On Moonlight Bay benefits from congenial players and unpretentious staging, especially in its musical numbers. Actor Ames makes father a likable stuffed shirt, and the able playing of young Actor Gray gives the picture its closest tie to Tarkington. Actress Day (27) does not quite pass for an 18-year-old, but her freshness keeps her in character and, like Co-Star MacRae, she sings pleasantly. Among such old favorites as the title song, the score delivers a bouncy new tune: Love Ya.

Rich, Young and Pretty (M-G-M), aglow with Technicolor and plush sets, treats a light cinemusical subject with the butterscotch-caramel sentimentality of the bobby-soxers it is designed to please. The subject: pleasures and pitfalls of romance for Texans in Paris.

Jane Powell, the veteran teen-age heroine, plays the daughter of a wealthy Texan (Wendell Corey with mustache); the mother is a chanteuse (Danielle Darrieux) who ran back to Paris when she got fed up with Texas. When Jane's father takes her along to Paris on his mission for the State Department, he tangles with two problems: 1) keeping the mother away from the girl; 2) keeping the girl from repeating his own mistake by marrying an eager young Frenchman (Vic Damone).

The movie tackles its situations without verve or humor, and handles its lightweight problems as ponderously as if they had been propounded by Ibsen in one of his gloomier moods. It offers the mild compensations of an opulent production, the agreeable sight of Actress Darrieux in her first Hollywood picture since 1938's Rage of Paris, and a couple of hummable tunes, We Never Talk Much and Paris. It also celebrates Crooner Vic Damone's movie debut with a triumph of miscasting; as a dashing, ambitious Frenchman, he projects all the earnest ardor of a tenderfoot taking the Scout oath.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.