The New Pictures

The Stooge (Hal Wallis; Paramount) is the seventh and most subdued of the movies ground out in the last three years by the zany comedy team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.* Stressing story instead of unadulterated slapstick, The Stooge plays it for chuckles rather than belly laughs. Dean is a song & dance man with an accordion and a swelled head, who is only a dim light on the Great White Way until lame-brained Jerry becomes his comic foil.

Co-authored by onetime Stooge Sid Silvers, the picture affords a few good glimpses of behind-the-scenes vaudeville activities. It also gives Dean Martin a chance to croon some pleasant tunes (With My Eyes Wide Open, I'm Yours) of the two-a-day vaudeville era. But The Stooge is at its best when it ditches its plot and gives toothy Comic Lewis a chance at his uninhibited mugging, e.g., bashfully kissing a girl for the first time, getting impossibly drunk, wrestling with a fold-up washbasin in a railroad sleeping car.

Babes in Bagdad (Danziger Bros.; United Artists), a film with a harem setting, is a case of boy meets girls. The ladies of the cadi of Bagdad's harem want to prove that women are the equals of men--and that each is thus entitled to a gentleman of her own. Led by Harem Beauties Paulette Goddard and Gypsy Rose Lee and aided by the caliph's dashing godson (Richard Ney), who believes in limiting his affections to "one woman for all time," they strike a blow for Eastern feminism.

The result, murkily photographed in a process called Exotic Color, is a harem-scarum movie featuring girls in Arabian nighties, goats-milk baths, and raids on caravans laden with gold. The dialogue seems more Hollywood than Bagdad. Sample: "Sire, I have uncovered such crimes as will tear this town wide open."

Girls in the Night (Universal-International) are all belles of New York's squalid Lower East Side: pretty Hannah (Patricia Hardy), brassy Georgia (Joyce Holden) and "ugly" Vera (Jacqueline Greene). Spurred on by jealousy of the other two girls, Vera tries to frame them for a murder committed by her boy friend (Don Gordon). At the fadeout, the real killer has been electrocuted on high-voltage wires after a helter-skelter chase along the waterfront, and things are looking rosier for Hannah, Georgia and their boy friends.

Girls in the Night has an intermittent hard look and some fast gab. It hints at the violence of its theme in several harsh sequences and in the performance of Don Gordon as a street fighter. But only rarely does the real tawdriness of its subject come across. With its trumped-up melodrama, the movie is just another undernourished thriller about underprivileged youngsters.

Castle in the Air (Associated British Pathe; Stratford Pictures Corp.) is the pleasant sort of camera romp that the British do so frequently and so well. The action takes place in an ancient, crumbling Scottish edifice that is "held up only by the ivy." Among its occupants: the impoverished 19th Earl of Locharne (David Tomlinson), who has lost just about everything but his sense of humor; an eccentric, kilt-clad dame (Margaret Rutherford), who is bent on establishing the earl as the rightful sovereign of Scotland; a National Coal Board man (Brian Oulton), who is assigned to commandeer the castle as a hostel for miners. The plot is thickened by a wealthy American widow (Barbara Kelly), who is out to buy the castle, and by a pretty blonde ghost named Ermyntrude (Patricia Dainton), who was the mistress of the earl's grandfather.

The proceedings are as lightheaded as they are lighthearted. Because the castle is in such an appalling state of disrepair and lacks central heating, Ermyntrude has to haunt it in a muffler. But the other characters pay little attention to her. "A nice little thing," observes one of them, "but rather pale." Castle in the Air is a nice little thing, too, and anything but pale.

* Who zoomed in 1952 to No. 1 position as box-office draws, according to a Motion Picture Herald poll of movie exhibitors.

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