The New Pictures

An American In Paris (MGM) is a grand show--a brilliant combination of Hollywood's opulence and technical wizardry with the kind of taste and creativeness that most high-budgeted musicals notoriously lack. The Technicolorful result is smart, dazzling, genuinely gay and romantic, and as hard to resist as its George Gershwin score.

The movie's boy-meets-girl story is simple, lighthearted and peopled with thoroughly likable characters. An ex-G.I. painter (Gene Kelly), happily roughing it on the Left Bank, picks up a charming shopgirl (Leslie Caron). They fall in love. He holds off a pleasantly wolf-girlish American heiress (Nina Foch) who is determinedly sponsoring him. But the shopgirl feels a stronger commitment to the devoted music-hall idol (Georges Guetary) who sheltered her through a wartime childhood. As it must for all lovers, especially in Paris, love finds a way.

This fragile fable reaches its climax in a beguiling 17-minute ballet that recalls The Red Shoes' dance sequences but dwarfs them in scope, lushness and variety. Set to the Gershwin musical suite that gives the film its name, the ballet is a kaleidoscope of the city's landmarks and moods, shifting with the adventures of the hero in his pursuit of the girl. Dance patterns, costumes and scenery fuse handsomely to paint each scene in the style of a different French artist: Dufy, Utrillo, Renoir, Rousseau, Toulouse-Lautrec.

Throughout, the film breathes the buoyant spirit of Gene Kelly. In 1949's On the Town, in which he served as co-director and star, Kelly staked his claim as the most original talent in Hollywood musicomedy; the new picture makes his claim secure. As a dance designer-performer, he is equally adept in Hollywood's most ambitious ballet and in a delightfully informal number setting I Got Rhythm into the form of an English lesson for an adoring clump of French children.

But An American in Paris is a product of many talents and a triumph of teamwork. Actress Caron, a young (19) French ballet dancer discovered by Kelly, combines dancing skill with a fetching simplicity and the plump-cheeked freshness of a Renoir model. The script, by Alan Jay Lerner, bounces wittily along under the direction of Vincente Minnelli. The Gershwin score brims with a dozen of his works, some heard only in snatches, some unfamiliar, ranging from such standards as 'S Wonderful and Embraceable You to Piano Concerto in F, played by Gershwin's leading interpreter, Pianist Oscar Levant, who doubles as a dour comedian.

Three designers, including Broadway's Irene (The King and I) Sharaff, fill An American in Paris with costumes which, like the rest of the movie, score as high in imagination as in lavishness. Notable example: the costumes for a tumultuous Beaux Arts Ball, which would tempt most moviemakers into a rainbow splurge, are all black & white. The effect, striking in itself, is the perfect aperitif for the banquet of color that follows in the ballet.

The Well (Harry M. Popkin; United Artists) pulls a switch, in the Hollywood vernacular, on the Negro-problem movie. Its victim of mob hysteria in a small U.S. town is not a Negro, but a white man falsely suspected of abducting a small Negro girl. Then the picture pulls another switch: when they learn that the girl has fallen Into an abandoned well,* the townspeople of both races, who have been at each other's throats, shamefacedly join hands in an all-out effort to rescue her.

Both ideas are ripe with drama and pointed social comment, and compelling enough to survive the uneven treatment the film gives them. The arrest of the white man (Henry Morgan) sets off a chain reaction of street violence, finally pits the sheriff (well played by Richard Rober) and the undermanned police against an angry rabble of whites, armed and led by Morgan's influential, bigoted uncle (Barry Kelly).

The town's abrupt shift from hysteria to contrition seems too sudden to be convincing, but the rescue itself, carried on through the night under the massed glare of automobile headlights, makes a tense, stirring sequence. And though the movie stretches the scene a bit thin, it builds to the climax with a skillful blending of emotional tugs: the race against time, the frantic worry of parents for a child, the inspiration of unselfish teamwork, the affirmation of human dignity in a whole town's effort for the sake of a single life.

The Red Badge of Courage (M-G-M), scrupulously faithful to the classic Stephen Crane novel, is one of the best war films ever made. The real hero of the movie is an Ohio volunteer regiment, marching into its first Civil War battle in a panoply of wind-whipped flags, rolling drums, aligned muskets and parade-ground smartness. The film's great effectiveness lies in the contrast between this brave display and the frightened, dry-mouthed men who give it life.

Avoiding the customary Hollywood cliches of battle, Writer-Director John Huston tells his story as it appears to Audie Murphy (who won the Medal of Honor as a World War II infantryman). Cast as a farm boy who wants desperately to give a good account of himself, he is terrified that he won't. Uneasily silent while his comrades are boisterously telling each other what they'll do to the Johnny Rebs, Murphy's staring eyes and constant swallowing are eloquent of the raw recruit's eternal question: Why is this happening to me? A sharp contrast is drawn between Murphy's pleased astonishment at standing firm against the first Confederate attack and his unreasoning panic when the enemy re-forms and comes on again. This time, Murphy and many of his regiment run for the woods.

Both the camera and the spoken commentary (taken word for word from Crane's novel) are filled with human understanding as they follow Murphy's wanderings through the rear areas. He stumbles along with the walking wounded, stands helplessly by as a good friend dies, gets caught in the floodtide of another retreat and is clubbed by a fleeing soldier when he tries to find out what's going on. Rejoining his regiment, Murphy fights as well on the second day as he did poorly on the first. But he is brilliantly shown to be the same man: equally confused and irrational, whether as a hero or as a coward.

As Murphy's comrade in arms, Cartoonist Bill Mauldin plays a young soldier who takes everything with deadly seriousness--from a fistfight in which not a blow is struck to the shattering moment when he and Murphy overhear a general describe their regiment as worthless, just before giving the boys a pep talk and ordering them to attack. With no more continuity or plot than the battle it describes, Red Badge is mostly memorable for its tight vignettes of human confusion. It ends on an appropriately ironic note: the jubilant regiment, having driven back the Confederates, learns that its hard fighting had little effect on the course of the action; the main part of the battle had been fought and won by other troops on another field beyond the mountains.

No Highway in the Sky (20th Century-Fox) puts James Stewart into the familiar role of a lovably naive eccentric who wages a one-man rebellion against bull-headed officialdom. Director Henry Koster freshens this foolproof formula with suspense and humor, casts Marlene Dietrich in no less foolproof a role as a glamorous movie queen, and surrounds his stars with a talented cast recruited in Britain, where the movie was filmed from a novel by Nevil Shute.

As Theodore Honey, an obscure research engineer in the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Stewart plugs patiently away at an experiment to prove his calculations that the tail assembly of the Reindeer, a new transatlantic plane, will snap off from metal fatigue after 1,400 flying hours. In a trance of pure science, he is unperturbed by the fact that Reindeers already in passenger service will reach the estimated breaking point long before his laboratory proof can be ready.

Without knowing quite what to make of the absent-minded researcher, his new boss (Jack Hawkins) orders the experiment speeded up, dispatches him to Labrador to look into the crash of one of the new planes. Widower Stewart says goodbye to his gravely precocious daughter (Janette Scott) and shambles aboard a Reindeer. The trip starts brightly enough; a pretty stewardess (Glynis Johns) pampers him, and Movie Star Dietrich dozes just across the aisle. Then he learns that the plane is just past its crucial point of strain.

From that moment on, audiences should instinctively reach for their safety belts while Hero Stewart desperately tries to convince a skeptical pilot and a pompous official hierarchy that what started as a problem in pure science has become an urgent matter of life & death.

Flying Leathernecks (RKO Radio] is the latest in the long line of films celebrating the exploits of U.S. arms in World War II. Except for the fact that its heroes are U.S. Marine flyers whose combat feats look unusually spectacular in Technicolor, the new movie differs from most of its predecessors no more than one can of C rations from another.

This time John Wayne (a Marine sergeant in Sands of Iwo Jima and a submarine commander in Operation Pacific) becomes a flying Marine major who drives his men ruthlessly to make a case for close ground-support tactics. Executive Officer Robert Ryan, another professional but more humane Marine, almost snaps under the strain. By the time the war moves from Guadalcanal to Okinawa and the plot strikes off its stereotypes of heroic death, comic relief and Stateside romance, Ryan learns from Wayne how to make his own tough command decisions, e.g., sacrificing his best buddy's life to the welfare of a mission.

Though its sweat and tears are obviously fabricated, Flying Leathernecks spills plenty of realistic blood. The film's long sequences of Marine fighters attacking Japanese troops, warships, Zero interceptors and Kamikaze pilots are full of authentic wartime footage, neatly dovetailed into shots of Actor Wayne, teeth bared, zooming down for the kill.

Pool of London (Universal-International) is a British thriller with a nice eye for waterfront scenes, and some fresh criminal and noncriminal faces. When his freighter ties up in London, Seaman Bonar Colleano goes ashore with a pocketful of contraband narcotics. He is easily enlisted by a gang of jewel thieves, who want him to smuggle their loot to Rotterdam. But before his ship sails, a murder has been committed, and both the police and gangsters are on his trail.

While spinning out its cops & robbers plot, Pool of London takes a sober look at racial problems in London, and investigates the fascinating off-duty life of a vaudeville acrobat. Moira Lister and Joan Bowling play a pair of hair-pulling tarts with gutter realism, Renee Asherson suffers attractively as a good girl gone wrong, and Susan Shaw brings a Sunday-school wholesomeness to her brief encounter with a Negro sailor (Earl Cameron).

* An incident inspired by the plight of three-year-old Kathy Fiscus, whom rescuers found dead in a San Marino, Calif, well after trying for more than two days to reach her (TIME, April 18,1949)-

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