The New Pictures

Five Fingers (20th Century-Fox) injects the long arm of Hollywood coincidence into the super-melodramatic, real-life story of World War II Spy Ulysses Diello, Albanian valet of the British Ambassador to Turkey. During 1944, Diello photographed and sold to the Nazis such top-secret documents from the British embassy in Ankara as the minutes of the Moscow, Cairo and Teheran conferences, and plans for Operation Overlord (the Normandy invasion). Ironically, the Nazis made no use of the information for fear that Diello, who operated with the code name "Cicero," was a British plant. Most of the -L-300,000 paid to him by the Germans turned out to be counterfeit. Cicero finally disappeared without trace,* while British and German agents played hide & seek for his hide.

The producers of Five Fingers have added to this true-fantastic tale a number of fanciful touches that detract from the unadorned facts. The picture gives Cicero (James Mason) a beautiful, double-crossing Polish countess (Danielle Darrieux) as his partner in spying and smooching, and has him ending up in a luxurious South American hideout. The film also drags in a few standard cinematic suspense props, e.g., a charwoman accidentally sets off the alarm which Cicero has disconnected while rifling the embassy safe.

Now & again Joseph (All About Eve) Mankiewicz's direction is too heavy-handed for this light-fingered subject. The picture has several good chases through Istanbul and Ankara, but the film adaptation of onetime German Attache L. C. Moyzisch's 1950 book, Operation Cicero, stresses screenplay rather than gunplay. Sample: when Cicero delivers his first batch of film to Moyzisch, he says pompously: "Destiny has held out its hand to you tonight. Take it and hold on."

James Mason, with his polished playing of the poker-faced valet, helps iron out some of the dialogue wrinkles in this cloak & dagger drama. Also lending a bit of credulity to the proceedings: Oscar Karlweis as Moyzisch and John Wengraf as his boss, Ambassador Franz von Papen.

Rancho Notorious (RKO Radio) is not meant to be taken seriously--even though it begins with a rape-murder and ends with Marlene Dietrich dying nobly for her fellow man. Director Fritz Lang has shaped his Technicolor western in the form of a cowboy ballad: the plaintive lyrics, sung by William Lee, set the stage for Arthur Kennedy's far-ranging manhunt of the foul fiend who dishonored and killed his sweetheart (Gloria Henry).

The search brings Cowhand Kennedy to Marlene's ranch on the Mexican border, a fancy men's club restricted to desperadoes who want rest and relaxation between their brushes with the law. While Kennedy tries to decide which of the resident badmen killed his girl, Marlene sings throatily, lazily crosses her beautiful legs, and looks sultry. She also irritates Gunman Mel Ferrer by going on moonlight walks with Kennedy and murmuring such sweet nothings as "I wish you'd go away and come back ten years ago."

Rancho ends in a predictable crescendo of six-shooters. Marlene brings the competence of long experience to her role of an aging seductress, Mel Ferrer is suitably dashing as "the fastest draw in the West," and Arthur Kennedy is all right as the vengeful lover, but he should not have been required to outrage Dietrich fans by delivering moral preachments to her.

* Fox publicists, expert at detecting espionage agents, claim that Cicero conveniently turned up in Ankara when the picture was shooting on location.

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