The New Pictures

The Marrying Kind (Columbia), a comedy drama about a supposedly average married couple, is the kind of picture that is best described as average.

The screenplay by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin flashbacks on Florence and Chet Keefer (Judy Holliday and Aldo Ray) as they tell a sympathetic lady judge (Madge Kennedy) about the troubles that led them to the divorce court after seven years of marriage and two children. Among their problems: 1) Aldo was once late to pick up Judy for a party, 2) Judy lost a $2,600 radio jackpot because Aldo tipped her on the wrong tune title when she knew the right one all along, and 3) Aldo was jealous.

After being so determinedly wry, the picture suddenly turns rueful when the Keefers' six-year-old son drowns at a picnic. From then on the movie never quite makes up its mind whether to be comedy or tragedy, and it never makes anything much of its two central characters. As they shape up on the screen, they seem not so much average as sub-average.

Under George (Born Yesterday) Cukor's direction, Judy Holliday is still playing dumb Billie Dawn, while Newcomer Aldo Ray is just a nice husky guy with an even huskier voice. The plot reconciles them at the end on the questionable grounds that they have a way of life worth saving, but by that time the wordy script has divorced itself from its theme.

Navajo (Hall Bartlett; Lippert) is a low-budget picture with the high-minded aim of giving moviegoers an insight into the problems of the modern Navajo Indian.

In dramatizing the adjustment of a seven-year-old Indian boy to a white man's world, the picture offers no feathers, war whoops or ceremonial dances, but it unfortunately uses some stock movie devices. Little Son of the Hunter, who speaks no English and is resentful of white men, runs away from the Chinle school and is pursued by a friendly Government teacher and a Ute interpreter. After a protracted, melodramatic chase through colorful Arizona country, one of the men is injured on a steep canyon slope. At this point, the picture drops its real problem in favor of artificial plot: the boy abruptly reconciles himself to white civilization in a finish that is psychologically and sociologically lame. Independently produced on a shoestring ($100,000) by 29-year-old Actor Hall Bartlett (who also appears in the picture as the schoolteacher), Navajo was filmed on the Navajo Indian Reservation in northern Arizona with a cast of unaffected amateurs headed by Francis Tee Keller, who is appealing as Little Son of the Hunter. For all its grandeur of setting, strikingly recorded in Virgil Miller's camera work of the Canyon of Death and Great Rock Canyon, Navajo wanders too far off its modest reservation to be really first-rate as either documentary or drama.

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