The New Pictures

Main Street to Broadway (Lester Cowan; MGM) is dedicated to the fond belief that everybody west of the Jersey Turnpike is simply fascinated by the theater in Manhattan; they may not be after seeing this movie, which is about as real as an actress' eyelashes.

The story and screenplay were furnished by two veteran playwrights who have dabbled in the movies before--Robert Sherwood (The Best Years of Our Lives) and Samson Raphaelson (The Jazz Singer, 1952 version)--but they seem to be writing down to the movies. While they occasionally use words of three syllables, the ideas are generally kindergarten. The story tells of an ambitious young playwright (Tom Morton) who tries to make the big jump from the Lower East Side to Broadway. But while romancing the theater, he neglects his small-town girl (Mary Murphy), who begins to pay attention to a hardware dealer with a soft heart (Herb Shriner).

At intervals, famed footlight personalities wander into the picture (it was produced with the help of the Council of the Living Theater, which will get 25% of the profits to advance the cause of the legitimate theater outside New York City). Among the guest artists: Shirley Booth handing out autographs; Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II shown composing a new song, a process which, in this version, consists chiefly of Hammerstein complaining that he cannot think of any words, and Rodgers saying soothingly, "It will come, Oscar, it will come"; Joshua (South Pacific) Logan and John (The King and I) Van Druten directing, and looking as nervous as Men of Distinction who have misplaced their highballs; Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer having a chat about the merits of triple-decker sandwiches (Rex is for, Lilli against).

Apart from these minor divertissements, there are two things that lend this slow-paced, obvious picture some fun. One is the young playwright and his literary labor pains, written here & there with a real touch of wit. As the egocentric fellow in search of a wife who will thrill him, worship him, and make about $75 a week, Newcomer Tom Morton is effective, in a junior-Brando sort of way. The other redeeming feature is Tallulah Bankhead, as the star for whom Playwright Morton is trying to build a vehicle. She plays a bowdlerized version of herself, fancying herself demure in calico, giving hell to Leo Durocher for losing a ball game, and calling everyone "dahling."

But the sum of all these parts still does not make one good movie.

The Master of Ballantrae (Warner) shows again that Robert Louis Stevenson (who died in 1894) wrote splendid movie material. His rousing adventure novel about redcoats, romance and rebellion makes an equally rousing movie. It trims a good deal of the novel's canvas (the book ranges from Scotland and France to India and America), but the topsails of Stevenson's spirit remain triumphantly aloft.

Filmed in Britain, the picture (like the recent Ivanhoe and The Story of Robin Hood) benefits by authentic backgrounds and an expert British supporting cast. Starting point is the Scottish insurrection of 1745, in which the Master of Ballantrae (Errol Flynn) sides with the Stuart rebels while his younger brother (Anthony Steel) remains loyal to King George II. By the time the Master returns to Ballantrae to be reunited with his brother, he has been given up for dead, escaped from the British in a smuggler's vessel, joined up with a band of buccaneers, looted a pirate galleon loaded with treasure, escaped the hangman's noose. Naturally, he has also made love to a satisfactory number of beautiful girls, among them an aristocratic redhead (Beatrice Campbell), a raven-haired village siren (Yvonne Furneaux), a brunette pirate dancing girl (Gillian Lynne).

In the novel, Stevenson wrote of the Master as that "wicked, wicked lad," and, despite the restraints of movie morality, Errol Flynn does his best to live up to this double-barreled challenge. He is relentlessly rakish as he fights, fences, fires guns, flies from balconies and ships' masts, and battles soldiers, pirates and his own brother. Charles Goldner and Jack Berthier make a pair of evil - buccaneers. Roger Livesey (the only member of the supporting cast fairly well known in the U.S., for his 1945 Colonel Blimp) is a bouncing, scampish comrade-in-arms for the Master. Starring with them in this bonny adventure, beautifully photographed in soft, heatherish tones by Jack (The African Queen) Cardiff, is the lovely Scottish countryside--the rolling moors, the craggy highlands, the glimmering roofs of the little burghs.

Night Without Stars (Rank) is what the British, who made it, might call a pretty bit of work at silly mid-off: a cricket position in which the fielder, close in, often has to stop a hot drive barehanded, without a change on his proper British countenance. The good thing about this little thriller is the way it meets the crude shocks of a common murder story and still keeps its human countenance.

The story: David Farrar, a British veteran half-blinded in the war, goes to the French Riviera for recuperation. He meets a French girl (Nadia Gray) who works in a shoestore but looks as if she lived in a chateau. Though she is engaged to marry another man, she falls in love with Farrar. All at once she disappears, leaving the fiance dead in his own apartment. David, unable to find her while his sight is impaired, goes back to England to risk an operation that may save his eyes. It does. Back on the Riviera, he sees his duty and does it in a way that leads to a conventionally forced ending.

What is not conventional about Night Without Stars is the warm, subtle and witty human tone it maintains almost throughout. The characters in Winston Graham's script are not stock figures at the mercy of fixed ideas, but individuals who rise to situations in a personal way. Anthony Pelissier's direction often creates a special excitement. One striking scene: when Farrar searches the other man's apartment after Nadia's disappearance, the set is lit so that the audience can see no more than the half-blind Farrar does; when Farrar sits on the couch, the corpse is glimpsed only an instant before it slumps sideways into his lap.

Actor Farrar in his quiet way preserves a sense of sane reality at the center of what might easily have been a silly whodunit. Nadia Gray is always credible, and lovely to look at in one or two heart-catching little love scenes. In short, at a game where overstatement is all too easy, the British tradition of playing it down is pretty good cinematic cricket.

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