The New Pictures

High Noon (Stanley Kramer; United Artists), creeping up on Hadleyville (pop. 400) one hot Sunday morning in 1870, is the moment of crisis for the little western cow town. Desperado Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald), whose jail sentence has been commuted through a political deal, is coming back on the noon train to take his revenge on the marshal (Gary Cooper) who sent him up. The marshal is no hero; he has already turned in his badge and is leaving Hadleyville with his wife (Grace Kelly) to open a general store in another town. But he turns back. There is a job to be done, and law & order in Hadleyville are at stake.

The solid citizens of Hadleyville are not so civic-minded. When the marshal tries to deputize a posse against Gunman Miller, everyone in Hadleyville finds excuses. Even the marshal's Quaker wife walks out on him because she is against killing. In Ramirez' saloon, they are laying odds that the marshal is dead five minutes after Miller gets off the noon train. Left high & dry in a town paralyzed by fear and morally bankrupt, the sweating marshal has to face Miller and three of his fellow desperadoes alone. Around this dramatic situation is built that Hollywood rarity: a taut and sense-making horse opera that deserves to rank with Stagecoach and The Gunfighter as one of the best westerns ever made.

High Noon combines its points about good citizenship with some excellent picturemaking. Carl (Champion) Foreman's screenplay is lean and muscular, and as noteworthy for its silences as for its sounds. And Fred (The Men) Zinnemann's direction wrings the last ounce of suspense from the scenario with a sure sense of timing and sharp, clean cutting. The picture builds from 10:40 a.m. to its high noon climax in a crescendo of ticking clocks, shots of the railroad tracks stretching long and level into the distant hills and of the hushed, deserted streets of Hadleyville. Throughout the action, Dimitri Tiomkin's plaintive High Noon Ballad sounds a recurring note of impending doom.

Now & then High Noon falters, e.g., the moment when the marshal's wife suddenly shows up to help him plug the desperadoes is stronger on gunplay than on screenplay. And Grace Kelly is somewhat overglamorous as the wife. But the rest of the performances are up to High Noon's generally high level of writing and direction, particularly Lloyd Bridges as the edgy deputy marshal and Katy Jurado as the marshal's fiery ex-girlfriend. Gary Cooper, as the marshal, has one of the outstanding roles of his long acting career: a tired and unheroic gunfighter, doggedly stalking through the desolate streets of Hadleyville, his lone figure casting a long shadow before it as the heat and drama mount relentlessly to the crisis of high noon.

Washington Story (MGM) might be subtitled Mr. Van Johnson Goes to Washington. Van plays a New England Congressman, party affiliation unspecified, who is without doubt the handsomest member of the lower house. Although Representative Johnson dislikes being interviewed, he changes his mind when he meets sexy Newswoman Patricia Neal. She tells him that she wants to do "a straightforward, factual account of morning, noon and night in a Congressman's week." and promises that "I'll be with you constantly.'' Before long. Johnson has dropped his "no comment" tactics, and is whispering sweet uncongressional remarks into Pat's ear as they dance cheek to cheek at Washington parties. The final clinch on the capitol steps can be foreseen a long time in advance.

When Van and Pat aren't billing & cooing, there is a parallel plot about a rather mysterious "President's shipbuilding dispersal bill." In voting for the bill. Congressman Johnson endangers his re-election by courageously placing the national welfare ahead of petty political considerations in his home district. Needless to say. he helps to rout the bill's enemies. The picture has some fairly lively scenes shot on the spot around Capitol Hill. In Robert (Battleground) Pirosh's writing and direction, and in smooth performances by Sidney Blackmer as a lobbyist. Philip Ober as a columnist and Louis Calhern as an elder Congressman, Washington Story turns out to be a rather diverting blend of love and legislation.

White Corridors (J. Arthur Rank; Universal-International) is a British hospital drama in which just about everything in sight is amputated but the long arm of coincidence. The setting is Yeoman's, a small country hospital where the medical staff seems to be in worse shape than the patients. Research Pathologist James Donald, who is conducting experiments involving penicillin-resistant cases, becomes infected, while treating a patient, with one of those mysterious, nameless movie ailments. Dr. Googie Withers, a beautiful lady surgeon who is in love with Dr. Donald, saves him with the very serum he had been trying to perfect.

The rest of the staff is also in bad shape. Nurse Moira Lister is pining for Resident Physician Jack Watling, who is engaged to Dagmar Wynter, daughter of the hospital board chairman. Watling's father, Senior Surgeon Godfrey Tearle, becomes so unnerved during an operation that he is unable to complete it. There is also a pretty fledgling nurse (Petula Clark) who has the jitters.

With so much smooching going on between doctors and nurses in offices, laboratories and ward rooms, it is small wonder the patients fare badly. A young boy dies of blood poisoning; a female patient's cerebral abscess is mistakenly diagnosed as tonsillitis; and Retired Civil Servant Basil Radford has to break his ankle to get admitted to the hospital for lumbago treatment. Pat Jackson has directed all this hectic activity in scalpel-keen style, but White Corridors never quite recovers from an ailing scenario.

The Winning Team (Warner) is a bleacher biography of baseball's late great Grover Cleveland Alexander (Ronald Reagan). Like The Pride of St. Louis (TIME, May 12), the movie life story of Dizzy Dean, The Winning Team dramatizes the ups & downs of Alexander's career in conventional and sometimes fanciful screen style. Alexander is depicted going from his telephone lineman's job to Midwest minor leagues in 1908, making a sensational major league debut with the Philadelphia Phillies in 1911 (28 won, 13 lost), and later becoming a pitching ace with the Chicago Cubs.

The picture has it that Alexander's decline was due to diplopia (double vision) after being hit on the head with a baseball. As a result, he takes to drink, but with the encouragement of his wife (Doris Day) and St. Louis Cardinal Manager Rogers Hornsby (Frank Lovejoy), he makes a dramatic comeback and helps the Cardinals win the 1926 World Series.

There are brief appearances by Big Leaguers Bob Lemon, Jerry Priddy, Peanuts Lowrey, Hank Sauer, Irv Noren, George Metkovich and Al Zarilla, and a few authentic shots of World Series games. But The Winning Team loses out through sand-lot writing and direction and a rookie performance by Ronald Reagan in the leading role.

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