The New Pictures

Scaramouche (M-G-M), based on Rafael Sabatini's costume-adventure yarn of pre-revolutionary France, combines spirited swordplay with a somewhat sluggish screenplay. Scaramouche (Stewart Granger) is an aristocrat who is bent on avenging the murder of his friend by malevolent Monarchist Mel Ferrer. Not only does Granger prove more than worthy of Master Swordsman Ferrer's steel; he also proves to be quite a gay blade by hiding out from the authorities with a troupe of traveling players. By the fadeout, Granger has found that Ferrer is really his halfbrother, and, in a happier twist of plot, that beauteous Janet Leigh is not really his sister, as he had supposed. This latter development prompts Eleanor Parker, a red-haired hellcat with whom Granger has been whiling away the previous reels, to console herself with a young Corsican lieutenant named Napoleon Bonaparte.

This French pastry has been served up with a rich helping of Technicolored spectacle as well as a good bit of overly rich dialogue and direction. The action includes a number of chases on horseback and a spectacular dueling scene in a candlelit Parisian theater, with Ferrer and Granger bounding from balcony boxes to backstage. Ferrer makes a smartly menacing Marquis, and Granger is a fine, swashbuckling figure, although he suggests little of that "gift of laughter" of which Sabatini wrote. Also on hand, in a minor role: Lewis Stone, now 72, who played the villainous Marquis to Ramon Novarro's Scaramouche in MGM's 1923 silent version.

The Outcasts of Poker Flat (20th Century-Fox) plays hob with Bret Harte's somber 1869 tale about a gambler, a drunk and a couple of ladies of easy virtue who are booted out of a California Gold Rush town as undesirables and die of cold and starvation in a snowbound mountain cabin. The picture casts out much of the pungent realism of Harte's story and adds some new characters, a dash of old-hat movie melodramatics, a romance and a happy ending.

Miriam Hopkins plays a fairly refined camp follower, while her companion has been transformed for purposes of movie romance into a good girl (Anne Baxter) who has misguidedly fallen in with a bad man (Cameron Mitchell). In the end, a handsome gambler (Dale Robertson) with a Southern drawl and a heart of gold chokes the bad man and redeems Anne with his love. Now & then the picture has some forcefully directed scenes, but this Outcasts emerges, on the whole, as flat movie drama.

Walk East on Beacon (Louis de Rochemont; Columbia) presents some typically melodramatic movie doings in semi-documentary style: a Communist spy ring attempts to worm some mysterious top-secret plans from a refugee scientist (Finlay Currie) through threats against his son, who is being held prisoner in Germany's Soviet zone. While the scientist feeds the spies false information, an FBI man (George Murphy) and his helpers close in on the gang after a series of chases on foot, by automobile and by boat.

Loosely based on the real espionage cases of Soviet Agent Harry Gold and Britain's Atomic Scientist Klaus Fuchs, the picture develops its anti-Red theme in such simple blacks & whites that it becomes a rather obvious thriller. In Alfred Werker's plodding direction of a talky screenplay. Walk East on Beacon moves at a too-leisurely pace for an action picture. Lending a bit of credulity to the proceedings are actual backgrounds filmed in Washington, New Hampshire and Boston.

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