The New Pictures

The Beggar's Opera (Warner) brings John Gay's renowned, raffish 18th century opera to the screen in English for the first time.* In the role of the highwayman Macheath, Shakespearean Actor Laurence Olivier also sings on the screen for the first time, in an agreeable, light baritone, and makes a fine, swashbuckling badman.

As adapted by Dennis Canaan and Christopher Fry, the film is a spirited horse opera, a kind of galloping, Hogarthian western, set to Sir Arthur Bliss's arrangement of the John Pepusch score.

There are tumultuous sequences as Olivier, after a wild fandango with the ladies of the tavern, is betrayed to the police and, perched on a coffin atop a cart, rides through a festive crowd to the gallows. Scene after scene is dressed up in resplendent Technicolored sets and costumes.

It is only a moderately entertaining movie, but Sir Laurence, as the highwayman, seems to be having great fun holding up stagecoaches, leaping through windows and over walls, outwitting the jailers and, in general, carrying on like a cross between Hamlet and Hopalong Cassidy.

Latin Lovers (MGM) is concerned with the difficult, rather specialized romantic problems of a multimillionairess. Lana Turner, a brisk Manhattan business girl with a $37 million fortune, worries (silly girl) because she fears that no man can love her for herself alone. She even suspects that well-heeled John Lund ($48 million) may be more interested in merging their factories than in gazing into her blue eyes.

In midstory, the film creakingly moves to Brazil and is taken over by the Rio de Janeiro chamber of commerce. In between plugs for the heady Brazilian climate, Lund falls off polo ponies and Lana exchanges passionate glances with Ricardo Montalban, who plays a bare-chested rancher with a coyly devilish grandfather (Louis Calhern). Since the plot offers no clear reason why the movie should run 104 Technicolored minutes, Scenarist Isobel Lennart has thrown in such extraneous items as a funnyman from the U.S. Embassy (Archer MacDonald), a brace of psychoanalysts (fast replacing mothers-in-law as Hollywood's stock figure of fun), and assorted Latin American production numbers. Lana's final solution to her money problems has a disarming simplicity: she gives it all to Fiance Montalban on the theory that "now he'll have to worry about it."

* A farfetched 1930 movie version in German was entitled Der Dreigroschenoper (The Three-Penny Opera).

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