The New Pictures

The Man Between (London Films; United Artists) features a famous cine-magician, British Director Carol Reed, using the same old saw that worked so well in Odd Man Out, The Third Man and The Fallen Idol. Again, Reed's biting suspense all but slices the moviegoer in half. But this time Director Reed does not quite manage to put him together again.

In The Man Between, the heroine is tooling down the road to Nowhere so fast that the audience can hardly read the signposts of the plot. She is a young Englishwoman (Claire Bloom) who goes to Berlin, 1953, for a visit with her brother (Geoffrey Toone), an officer in the British occupation force. Almost at once she senses dark, hurrying shapes in the outwardly placid life of her sister-in-law (Hildegarde Neff), and soon curiosity tempts her to take a plunge into the shadowy mystery.

For her pains she is pursued by a shark in the service of the Russians (James Mason) who gives her a chase that is all the more stimulating because she never knows whether he is after her neck or just after her pretty face. In due course, the shark proves human and takes the bait Ingenue Bloom only too happily offers. The Russians rush off after them both on just the kind of joyride that Reed likes best to give his camera--the chase through a great city by night. Bloom and Mason hole up at last in a dingy East zone apartment and spend a lot of time proving that men & women act the same way behind the Iron Curtain as they do behind the gauzy type. After this, Mason has the censors on his trail as well as the Russians.

The camera work is not quite so impressive as in The Third Man, but the picture nevertheless paces tiger-like, moving as only Reed can make a movie move --with a silken glide through an underbrush of menacing irrelevance. The actors work almost faultlessly under his direction. Mason, speaking the strange German-English accent he tried out in The Desert Rats, turns in one of his most careful performances, and makes the part of a romantic baddie into a pretty convincing picture of a middle-aging liberal who has followed the purse strings to the left. Claire Bloom, a wonderfully charming and gifted ingenue, moves through her scenes winningly. Hildegarde Neff is heavy, magnetic and subtle as the troubled sister-in-law. She has a Dietrich-like voice and a Garbo-like capacity to make silence intensely interesting.

The letdown is caused by the fact that

Director Reed and Scripter Harry Kurnitz have far fewer things to say about people than they have ways to say them. The theme of The Man Between is, after all, no more than love-on-the-run, and all the political furniture could just as well be Grand Rapids--it is only there for the hero and heroine to fall over. As a result, Director Reed spends much of his time straining for exquisite effects (e.g., the hoarse crunch of snow under the Russian kidnap-car as it crawls like a malevolent beetle in pursuit of the heroine) that go with the rest of the picture about as well as a Dostoevsky passage goes with Erie Stanley Gardner.

Crazylegs (Hall Bartlett; Republic) is an agreeably amateurish movie about professional football players. Produced in Hollywood by Hall (Navajo) Bartlett on a shoestring ($145,000), the film tells the life story of Wisconsin's All-America Elroy ("Crazylegs") Hirsch and is chiefly remarkable for the fact that Footballer Hirsch plays himself on the screen. Since he looks like a dark-haired Kirk Douglas and meets every cinema crisis with the wooden impassivity of Alan Ladd, Hirsch easily passes most of Hollywood's requirements for a leading man.

Unfortunately, Hirsch's life--though it contains some high moments--has a low dramatic intensity. In the film, he marches steadily from triumph to triumph on the nation's gridirons until he fractures his skull while playing for the professional Chicago Rockets. After a long convalescence and some determined hard work, Hirsch makes it back to the gridiron in time to help the Los Angeles Rams win the 1951 championship. Most of the film's football action is supplied by exciting newsreel clips of Hirsch running wild against various Big Ten and pro teams. But off the playing field things slow down to a walk. Newcomer Joan Vohs plays the thankless role of sweetheart and wife, while Veteran Lloyd Nolan tries to hold the film together as Hirsch's high-school coach and most loyal fan.

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