The New Pictures

Three Coins in the Fountain (20th Century-Fox) is another CinemaScope travelogue--this time making a wide-screen tour through Italy. Completely dwarfed by spectacular shots of Venice, Tivoli and Rome is a feeble little plot about a trio of American girls who spend a tedious 102 minutes getting their men: Dorothy McGuire wins Novelist Clifton Webb (wearing a henna rinse); sultry Jean Peters gets a sure-enough Italian, Rossano Brazzi; Maggie McNamara captures Prince Charming in the person of Louis Jourdan. Why any of the six is so set on marrying any of the others is never satisfactorily explained.

Hollywood should re-examine the film before exporting it to Europe, where it may set back Western amity by 20 years. Two of the girls work as secretaries in a U.S. Government agency which, as a matter of policy, seems to regard most Italians as strictly colonial inferiors. When Actress Peters starts to run around with Actor Brazzi, who plays a lowly Italian translator, her boss and his wife react as if she were bound on miscegenation in the Deep South. But the film is pretty, even if peopled by dunces.

The French Line (RKO Radio) is long on notoriety and short on entertainment. It begins with a tame striptease by Jane Russell (she ducks behind furniture as she takes it off) and closes with a bump-and-grind dance that shocked both the Breen office and the Legion of Decency, though it is more notable for poor taste than salaciousness. These two low points of the picture are connected by a limp story line that once again asks the burning question: How can a U.S. millionheiress be sure that she is loved for herself and not for her millions? Gilbert Roland supplies the answer with a French accent.

Man with a Million (Rank; United Artists) is borrowed from a Mark Twain short story that dealt entertainingly with the fabled eccentricity of the British and the equally well-known resourcefulness of Americans. The film is an Anglo-American enterprise, directed by Ronald (The Promoter} Neame, written by Jill Craigie (wife of M.P. Michael Foot), and starring Hollywood's veteran Gregory Peck.

Actor Peck is cast as a jobless U.S. clerk who falls victim in London to a wonderfully impractical joke. Two rich British brothers have made a wager: one bets that a man with no other resources could live for a month on the credit he could cadge simply by flashing a legitimate million-pound note; the other bets that he would sooner or later have to cash the bill. Peck is picked, and told that if he succeeds he can name any job he wants.

Accepting, Peck eats a hearty meal in a restaurant and then beckons the proprietor. "I'm awfully sorry," he murmurs casually, "but I don't have anything smaller." It works. It works again with an expensive tailor and again at a fashionable club. Reporters rush to interview the "vest-pocket millionaire." Heiresses of ancient lineage come to squeal like pigs in clover and an old friend shows up with a "sure thing"--a gold mine guaranteed to make millions later for thousands now. It all moves along amusingly--until the hero discovers that he has lost his million-pound note.

The trouble with the picture is that the moviegoer may really think for a minute there is going to be an unhappy ending. It is intended as farce but played like drama: the Lincolnesque leading man winds up for each line as lugubriously as if he were trying to split rails instead of fracture the audience.

Men of the Fighting Lady (MGM) has moments as fiery and explosive as a bomb rack loaded with napalm. Put together from two Satevepost articles (by James Michener and Commander Harry Burns), the film takes a documentary look at a carrier-based jet squadron engaged in daily and seemingly profitless strafings of a North Korean railway junction. But when it struggles with its own pet moral problem ("No man is an island," etc.), the pace rapidly falls off from jet propulsion to a soporific amble.

Louis Calhern and Walter Pidgeon do most of the slowpoke moralizing. The action is in the capable hands of Frank Lovejoy, Keenan Wynn, Van Johnson and Newcomer Dewey Martin. Wynn is excellent as a retread veteran who wants to come out of the war with honor, but alive, and is therefore fated for an early death --shown in an appalling sequence, taken from official Government film, of the crash of a plane on a flight deck.

Actors Johnson and Martin ably handle the second thrill sequence: the guiding to safety of a pilot who has been blinded by antiaircraft fire. Director Andrew Marton wisely keeps the wisecracks to a minimum, while the Ansco Color and a skillful interlarding of Defense Department film give moviegoers the illusion of knowing exactly what it was like to make a bombing run on Wongsang-ni.

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