The New Pictures

Million Dollar Mermaid (MGM) is a splashy musical that casts Cinemermaid Esther Williams as Annette Kellerman, the foremost amphibian attraction of the early 1900s. The picture takes Annette, who is described as "half woman and half fish," from Sydney, Australia to London, where she makes a much publicized 26-mile swim down the Thames; then to the New York Hippodrome, where she is billed as a diving Venus in tank extravaganzas; and finally to Hollywood, where she is badly injured during the filming of an underwater picture. For romance, there is a conventional (and fictional) triangle involving the Hippodrome's impresario (David Brian) and Annette's manager, James Sullivan (Victor Mature), whom she married in real life and with whom the still trim, 64-year-old ex-bathing beauty lives today in Santa Monica, Calif.

The picture is as tailored to Mermaid Williams' specifications as the one-piece bathing suits she wears in the picture (Annette Kellerman daringly introduced the one-piece suit 44 years ago). There are several spectacular Busby Berkeley water ballets, churning with sky-high fountains, Technicolored smoke effects and choruses of movie mermaids and mermen sliding down chutes and diving off swings. So long as it stays in the water, Million Dollar Mermaid is good fun. In its landlocked sequences, it is just another dry cinebiography.

Face to Face (Huntmgton Hartford; RKO Radio) is a two-part picture of mixed merits that gets its title from Rudyard Kipling's The Ballad of East and West. ("But there is neither 'East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!")

The first episode, based on Joseph Conrad's The Secret Sharer, considers the moral dilemma of a young captain (James Mason) who gives refuge on board his ship to a murderer (Michael Pate), and, after much soul-searching, decides to set him free. Conrad's story wrestled with one of his favorite themes: the judge and the judged. By jettisoning the inner probing and the moral preoccupation of the original, the film emerges as a becalmed, dialogue-ridden mood piece.

Far better is the dry humor of Stephen Crane's cowpoke story, The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky. A hard-drinking, fast-shooting old reprobate named Scratchy (Minor Watson), the last bad man left in the little western town of Yellow Sky, is sadly disillusioned when his longtime antagonist, the town marshal (Robert Preston), brings home a bride. Confronted with an unfamiliar atmosphere of respectability, Scratchy resignedly throws away his six-shooter and says farewell once & for all to his glorious gun-toting past. In James Agee's lean adaptation and in some peppery performances, The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky captures much of Crane's pungent idiom, and becomes a spry blend of gun-in-holster and tongue-in-cheek.

The twin picture is also a double debut. It is the first offering of Huntington Hartford, 40-year-old art patron and heir to A & P millions, who decided to turn producer, with plans to deliver two pictures a year during the next three years for RKO release. It also introduces to the screen (as the beguiling bride of Crane's sheriff) Marjorie Steele, a onetime cigarette girl in a Hollywood nightspot, who is Hartford's wife in real life.

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