The New Pictures

Athena (M-G-M). For Hollywood musicals, 1954 has been a good year. M-G-M led off with Seven Brides for Seven Brothers; Warner followed with A Star Is Born, and Fox with Carmen Jones. Now M-G-M has made a musical burlesque of some California cults. The idea is brutally chewed up in the execution, but enough remarkable bits and pieces land on the screen to make Athena well worth a look.

The story: Adam Calhorn Shaw (Edmund Purdom) has everything a young man could want--prominent family, imminent fame, eminent income. Two young women (Linda Christian and Jane Powell) want not only him, but his attributes, too. Linda is a nice, safe society type, but Jane (the Athena of the title) is something else again. She lives with grandma (Evelyn Varden) and grandpa (Louis Calhern) on a Southern California hilltop. Grandma, a buxom old beldam, wears a flowing white burnoose. Grandpa is a gay old (78) caloric crank.

By day, grandpa's seven granddaughters (Athena, Minerva. Niobe, Aphrodite, Calliope, Medea and Ceres) run a yoghurt, blackstrap and spinach-juice store, and after hours they take their eurythmics in the grove. Grandpa is delighted to meet Adam ("I liked the look of your sartorius muscle as soon as I saw you"), and invites him to a meal of peanutburgers. That night Athena sends Adam home with tokens of her love: a bag of raw vegetables and a bar bell.

But alas for Adam's vegetable idyl! The villain, Mr. Universe (Steve Reeves), idly nibbles at a white orchid and pouts: "You've been avoiding me, Athena, and I'm full of acid and electricity." One day he wraps his triceps around Adam's neck, but Adam remembers his Commando tactics, flattens the meatless wonder and gets the girl. As one of her sisters remarks: "It's wonderful what you can do without muscles."

A few of the story's golden opportunities are polished bright--some of the fad stuff could hardly be funnier--but too many are dipped in common brass. The tunes, all but one called Imagine, are routine musicomedy, and the lyrics are of the sort that rhyme "baritone" with "aware o'tone." Even so, as crackpots go, Louis Calhern is a Ming vase, and Evelyn Varden provides at least one fine moment. At the Mr. Universe contest, while Steve Reeves is straining to lift the crucial bar bell, she glares at Purdom and hisses: "Don't just sit there! Hold the good thought."

The Last Time I Saw Paris (M-G-M). Oscar Wilde presumed that when good Americans die, they go to Paris. Other authors have observed that bad Americans go there to live. Elliot Paul has often gushed in agreement with Wilde; Scott Fitzgerald tended, a little guiltily, to think the opposite. By putting a Paul title to a Fitzgerald story (Babylon Revisited), this picture tries to please everybody. It won't.

Fitzgerald told his tale in about 20 pages. The movie, by putting scene after scene like printer's leads between the lines of the story, keeps it going, and going heavy, for 116 minutes. Van Johnson is a Stars & Stripes reporter. Mustered out in Paris after World War II, he marries Elizabeth Taylor, a happy little flapper of the '40s with money on her mind. "Are you rich?" is the first thing she asks him. He is poor, but that, as she concedes, only makes it cheaper to live as if they weren't. For a few years the nights are tender, even if the mornings are rough. In between the play periods, Johnson finds time to work in a press agency and to write novels. But when publishers reject his third book, Johnson loses faith in himself, begins to believe in the bottle. One cold, wet night, thoroughly sozzled, he falls asleep and forgets to unlock the front door for his wife. She catches pneumonia and dies.

Aside from its length, the script (by Julius J. and Philip G. Epstein and Rich ard Brooks) is a fairly clever one. The verbal sparks fly often: "I catch colds even from weather forecasts," says Actress Taylor, and a high-society siren (Eva Gabor) screams gaily at a man she has met but can't remember: "Believe me! The only thing I've forgotten about you is your name." With better than her usual lines to speak, Actress Taylor sometimes manages to speak them as if she knew what they meant. And Van Johnson gives everything he has -- his emotional range gets steadily wider -- to a portrayal that is obviously intended to encompass Fitz gerald himself.

But all these excellent efforts are lost in the general effort to bring the '20s up to date -- an attempt about as sensible in 1954 as mixing bathtub gin.

Drum Beat (Jaguar; Warner) is the second picture starring Alan Ladd to be released in two weeks, the fifth in the last twelve months. It was made fast and made badly at low cost ($1,100,000) for a quick turnover in the neighborhood tills, but like most of its predecessors, it will probably show a solid profit for its investors--among them Alan Ladd. The profit might be greater, however, if Stockholder Ladd could manage not to look, in most of his scenes, like a man who is barely keeping awake at a board meeting.

Ladd's product tells about some Modoc Indians who have run off the reservation in revolt. President U.S. Grant orders Frontiersman Ladd, a famed Indian fighter, to pacify them, if possible without firing a shot. To get in practice, Ladd starts turning the other cheek to Audrey Dalton, a friend of the President's daughter. One night he tried to find out what she wants in a man. "He'd have to be good at everything," pants Audrey, carried away in a sort of agricultural rapture. "He'd have to know how to plow"--Ladd kisses her--"and plant seeds"--Ladd seizes her fiercely--"and harvest!"--scene interrupted by messenger summoning Ladd to council of war. However, by the time the No. 1 Indian (Charles Bronson), a heap-big physical specimen, is through with him, Ladd looks plenty glad to beat his Winchester into a plowshare.

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