The New Pictures

Desperate Moment (J. Arthur Rank; Universal-International) tries to do for West Berlin what The Third Man did so successfully for Vienna. Refugee Dirk Bogarde has confessed to a murder he did not commit because he thinks he has nothing left to live for. But as soon as he begins serving his life term, his long-lost girl friend (Mai Zetterling) turns up. Breaking out of jail to clear his name, Bogarde is hounded through the rubble-strewn ruins by the police and matches wits with skulking black-marketeers. The film fails because its events are too predictable for suspense, its hero and heroine too coldly competent for sympathy, and its villain (Albert Lieven) too inept to generate excitement.

Mr. Scoutmaster (20th Century-Fox) enacts one more battle in Clifton Webb's long movie war with children. Perhaps because he is opposed this time by as potent an organization as the Boy Scouts, Webb is considerably more mellow than in his Mr. Belvedere days: he strikes only one urchin (and then with only a blob of ice cream), and soon loses his heart to a frog-voiced eight-year-old (George Winslow). Webb takes over an unruly troop of Scouts because, as a writer of TV children's shows, he thinks he should know more about the spaceship set.

The film milks a few laughs by dressing Webb up as a scoutmaster and turning him loose on an overnight hike with his irreverent charges. Unfortunately, the whole thing soon turns from slapstick to sentiment as Webb and his wife (Frances Dee) decide to adopt Master Winslow. Edmund Gwenn does his twinkling best as a clergyman in on the plot to make a child-lover of Webb.

Mr. Denning Drives North (Carroll) is a better-than-average British thriller. John (Great Expectations) Mills, a successful jet-aircraft designer, suddenly begins to neglect his work, takes to drink, and wakes up screaming from nightmares. When he attempts suicide by crashing his plane, his wife (Phyllis Calvert) has it out with him, learns that he has accidentally killed an unsavory admirer of their daughter (Eileen Moore). What bothers Mills is not so much the killing as the fact that the dead man's body (which he had thrown in a ditch to make it seem a hit & run accident) has mysteriously disappeared.

With his wife's help, Mills sets out to look for the missing corpse, discovers that the body was robbed and buried by a passing gypsy. His daughter's new suitor, a U.S. patent lawyer (Sam Wanamaker), gets idealistically involved in the case and, in clearing the gypsy of murder, relentlessly involves his future father-in-law in the crime. What is good about the film is the full-bodied characterization of the killer as a man willing to compromise --but only up to a certain point--to save his own life. Its chief surprise is an ending calculated to stun moviegoers accustomed to Hollywood's sin-must-be-punished production code.

99 River Street (United Artists) retells the surefire old story of the worm who turns. Cabdriver John Payne is an ex-pug who gets his first brass-knuckle treatment from fate when an eye injury ends his boxing career just as he is on the brink of winning the world's heavyweight championship. In quick succession, he is deceived by his wife, played for a sucker by an aspiring actress (Evelyn Keyes), unjustly accused of assault & battery, framed for murder, hammered to a pulp by one gangster, pistol-whipped by another, and shot by a third. Before it is too late, Payne loses his temper and beats up everybody in sight--a magic Hollywood formula that enables him to corral all the criminals, clear his name, and settle down happily in a rose-covered gas station with Actress Keyes, who has had a change of heart.

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