The New Pictures

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (20th Century-Fox) is apparently predicated on the theory that if half the moviegoing population prefers Marilyn Monroe and half prefers Jane Russell, then just about everybody will be devastated by a picture that features both. There is, in fact, a danger that some impressionable moviegoers, unable to make up their minds which of the stars they prefer, may go quietly hysterical, like laboratory mice caught between two morsels of cheese.

But, for all the three-dimensional attractions of its two leading ladies, this is a rather flat cinemusical. This version adds flashy songs, dances, Technicolor, a present-day setting and a happy ending to Anita Loos's famed 1925 bestseller about the fine art of gold digging during the jazz age. It also subtracts much of the original's satire, intelligence and wit.

Even before the credit titles are flashed on, Marilyn and Jane are on the screen in spangled scarlet dresses slit to a fare-thee-well above and below decks, hammering out a number entitled The Little Girls from Little Rock. From then on, the picture is so busy leering at Marilyn and Jane that it never gets around to being much of a picture. The result, while still fun, is a burlesque of burlesque, a kind of Minsky in mink.

As Lorelei Lee, who believes that diamonds are a girl's best friend, Marilyn Monroe does the best job of her short career to date. Her almost surrealist figure, quite as implausible as a Petty girl's, fascinates every male aboard a transatlantic luxury liner, from a monocled old millionaire (Charles Coburn) to a six-year-old boy with a valet and a foghorn voice (George Winslow). In the process, she also sings remarkably well,* dances, or rather undulates all over, flutters the heaviest eyelids in show business, and breathlessly delivers such lines of dialogue as "Coupons--that's almost like money," as if she were in the throes of a grand passion. As Lorelei's chaperone, who wants her to go off the gold standard, Jane Russell does a frenetic, blond-wigged imitation of Marilyn and, surrounded by a beefcake chorus of athletes, sings Anyone Here for Love? in fine deadpan style. Sample dialogue: First Athlete: "If the ship hits an iceberg and sinks, which girl would you save from drowning?" Second Athlete with a smirk: "Those girls couldn't drown."

Ride, Vaquero! (MGM) makes the old horse operas on TV look good. It takes some of Hollywood's silkiest purses and, without half trying, promptly and efficiently turns them into sow's ears. It has a beautiful star (Ava Gardner), yet somehow manages to make her seem drab, and a basically exciting story (bandits v. ranchers) which, in this version, has no more suspense than a mystery story read backwards. Ava is the wife of a handsome, brave, wooden-faced Texas rancher (Howard Keel), who gets into a feud with a Mexican bandit (Anthony Quinn), a fellow who uses vino as a gargle. This bandit has a lieutenant, a handsome, brave, wooden-faced desperado (Robert Taylor). Gardner takes one look at Taylor and her earrings start aquivering.

After several reels, Gardner kisses Taylor, whereupon Taylor slaps Gardner, which seems bad manners even in frontier Texas. Follow some shooting, riding, burning, and some pallid attempts by the scriptwriters to make the whole affair into a kind of road-company Shane. When at last the end arrives, slow as an old mule across the desert, it brings the funniest movie scene in years: Taylor and Quinn shooting each other dead and dropping to the barroom floor simultaneously, like well-rehearsed ballet dancers. Ride, Vaquero! has some exciting stretches, but Anthony Quinn as the bandit provides the only glimpses of distinction; at moments he is so good that he seems to have ridden into the scene out of some other movie. As a Mexican priest, Kurt Kasznar is conscientious and effective. Miss Gardner is exquisitely bored. Taylor is Taylor. Even the Technicolor is fuzzy, but there are some fine shots of some fine horses.

Second Chance (RKO Radio) is the seventh chance 3-D has had to prove that it is here to stay. For the seventh time it has proved itself only a novel gimmick. The third dimension, however, is the least thing wrong with Second Chance, a picture with Robert Mitchum and Linda Darnell in the leading roles. According to some touching publicity releases, Bob and Linda are trying to communicate "a love story that is a pattern for faith."

It may be a spiritual light that comes into Mitchum's eyes when he gets a glom of Darnell, or then again it may only be the glare of some passing headlights. At any rate, it is fairly certain that Prizefighter Mitchum never had faith in anything but his good right hand. He loses that faith when he kills a man in the ring, and heads across the border to forget about it. There he meets Linda, for whom faith seems to be nothing more than confidence that she can keep one wiggle ahead of Jack Palance, a really frightening gunman who offers her a choice between death and a fate worse than that.

This man Palance keeps the show as well as Linda on the move. A rivet-eyed, onetime prelim fighter from the Pennsylvania coal country, Palance (ne Palahnuik) gave terrifying performances in Shane and Sudden Fear, has since become the hottest heavy in Hollywood. His face alone, as thin and cruel as a rust-pitted spade, is enough to-frighten a strong man; and to make matters worse, he seems to emit hostile energy, like something left overnight in a plutonium pile.

Among the picture's other attractions, there is a strong suggestion that Bob and Linda do more than chatter about the pretty native blankets in that hotel bedroom. There is also a free tour of Cuernavaca and Taxco, two of Mexico's most beautiful cities. And finally, there is a battle royal in a busted cable car suspended thousands of feet above the Andes (the picture never makes clear what Mexicans are doing in the Andes). As the car plunges to destruction--after all the right people are rescued--a Mexican makes a remark that may fittingly serve as a caption for the whole show. It was, he says, "a beautiful disaster!"

Vice Squad (Levy and Gardner; United Artists) introduces the stream-of-consciousness technique at the precinct level. What James Joyce did in Ulysses for Leopold Bloom, this picture does for a detective captain. And though a day in the life of a flatfoot does not exactly provide many Joycean transfigurations--especially when the flatfoot is Edward G. Robinson --the film does leave the audience feeling like a thoroughly chewed cigar.

Detective Robinson's day begins with the bad news that a patrolman has been shot the night before while trying to stop a car heist. Then a stool pigeon tells him that a well-known hood is back in town to pull a bank job. Piece by piece, evidence comes in to connect the hood with the heist. By 9 a.m. the bank in question is staked out with plain clothesmen. At 1 p.m. the visiting hood and his gang strike, as expected. After a savage gun battle, two thugs get away--without the loot. By 5 p.m. the captain has cracked two witnesses and, on their information, caught the rest of the gang on the getaway. He thereupon calmly goes home to supper.

In its main movement, the picture has all the drive of a .45 slug, but the comic interludes are mostly misfires. Paulette Goddard is agreeably bummy as an affluent madam, and Porter Hall, as one of the witnesses (an undertaker on a spree), firmly supports many a shaky scene with his main comic device: an almost completely absent chin. Edward G. Robinson is as monotonous and entertaining as ever. An actor who has developed well-nigh infinite modulations of the sneer, Robinson, after 30 years of practice, has at last produced his masterpiece. In Vice Squad, he displays a sneer so spectacular that he can almost be said to smile.

* Cinemogul Darryl Zanuck signed an affidavit solemnly affirming that the voice on the sound track was really Marilyn's.

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