The New Pictures

Dangerous When Wet (M-G-M), like all cinemusicals starring Movie Mermaid Esther Williams, is at its best when it gets its leading lady into the water. Fortunately, in this film she is in the water a good deal of the time. Esther has an opportunity to display her aquabatics in an Arkansas swimming hole and in a swimming pool in a French chateau. She also swims the English Channel with the encouragement of a French champagne salesman (Fernando Lamas), who helpfully dives into the water from his yacht and paces her in the last lap. There are some blithe tunes by Arthur Schwartz and Johnny Mercer, and the whole thing has been briskly staged by Charles (Lilt) Walters. Best sequence: an underwater dream ballet, in which Esther capers among the coral with Tom and Jerry, the animated-cartoon cat and mouse.

Houdini (Paramount) dramatizes the life of Master Magician Harry Houdini,* famed for his escapes from strait jackets, handcuffs, jail cells and locked and sealed containers of all kinds. Unfortunately, this account of the Houdini story fails to escape from the conventional, romanticized film-biography formula.

In rich Technicolor, the Houdini career is followed from struggling carnival magician to the world's best known illusionist. The movie ends with his death in 1926 at the age of 52 while he was suspended upside down in a strait jacket in a huge tank of water (actually, Houdini died in a hospital of peritonitis). Other highlights: his arrest in Germany on the charge that his act was a fraud and his acquittal after demonstrating his abilities in a courtroom; his escapes from a strait jacket while dangling from a Times Square building, from a packing case lowered into the icy Detroit River, from an "escape-proof" cell in the Tower of London; his attempts, after the death of his mother, to communicate with her through mediums and his subsequent campaign to expose spiritualists as fakes.

The picture makes no attempt to give away any of the secrets of Houdini's feats. In the title role, Tony Curtis is as unrevealing about Houdini the man as about Houdini the magician, hardly hinting at his dynamic personality, strength, ingenuity and resourcefulness. As Houdini's wife and assistant, Janet Leigh (Mrs. Tony Curtis in real life) is another cute trick. Together, they achieve an illusion that outdoes Houdini himself: in the good old Hollywood tradition, they grow old in the film's final sequences without perceptibly growing one bit less young and handsome.

Pickup on South Street (20th Century-Fox) is a 90-minute muscle-flexing exercise in violence. A pickpocket (Richard Widmark) slaps a former roadhouse entertainer (Jean Peters) in the teeth, knocks her out with a right to the jaw, and revives her by pouring a bottle of beer in her face. The B-girl retaliates by conking him over the head with another beer bottle. A Communist spy (Richard Kiley) beats up and shoots the girl, hits a cop over the head with a pistol, and kills an eccentric old necktie peddler (Thelma Ritter). The pickpocket knocks out the spy by smashing his head against a wall, slugs it out with him on a subway platform and on the tracks in front of an oncoming train.

All this mayhem is brought on when the pickpocket discovers some microfilm containing military secrets in a wallet he has lifted from the B-girl's purse. By the fadeout, the pickpocket and the B-girl have found true love, and Government agents, with the pickpocket's help, have smashed a Red spy ring.

* Real name: Ehrich Weiss. He was the son of an Appleton, Wis. rabbi.

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