The New Pictures

Man Without a Star (Universal). "Did yew say INSAHD the haouse?" Kirk Douglas, a new hand on the Triangle spread, is plumb dumfounded. "Wah," he gasps, "it hain't har'ly deesint." A little later he says to his pard he says, "Did yew heah whut thet maan said? INSAHD the haouse!" As they ride out to the ranch. Cowboy Douglas keeps shaking his head, he's that amazed. As soon as they get there, he wants to know, "Whin we gonna see it?" "After lunch," growls Jay C. Flippen, the foreman. After lunch, Douglas busts right out, "Kin we see it naow?" "Yup," says the foreman. The two men brace themselves, walk shoulder to shoulder to the front door of the main ranch house, open it, walk through the bedroom, open the door beyond. Timidly Cowboy Douglas peeks in. His eyes bulge. His jaw drops.

When at last he turns away, there is a kind of bliss upon his face, as of a man who has seen the throne of glory itself.

"Naow," he breathes, "I wanna see the maan whut uses it." The man that uses it turns out to be a woman, Jeanne Grain, and all this, no kidding, is the beginning of a beautiful romance. More's the pity, too, because, except for this monumental piece of what might be called "in-house humor," Man Without a Star has a roll-muh-own greasiness and good warm-leather reek about it that is rare in Hollywood westerns. The rootin', tootin' (with Claire Trevor as the whirly-girly) and shootin' are unusually low-falutin. There is one long shot of a man being dragged by a horse through enough barbed wire fence to justify the use of Technicolor in this picture.

To Paris With Love (Rank; Continental). It takes a certain nerve for a comedian to try a throwaway line. But it takes nothing less than the sublimest gall when he tries--as Alec Guinness does in this comedy--a complete, unmitigated, 78-minute throwaway picture. He tries, he succeeds. To Paris With Love is a suave and elegant little comedy of indirections. And yet, unfortunately, Guinness & Co. will probably discover that in throwing away their picture they have thrown away much of their audience too.

The first thing Guinness discards is his stock in trade: the little man with a big idea. In this script he is a big man--a millionaire, in fact--with a little idea: to take his 20-year-old son (Vernon Gray) on a trip to Paris and see if there's life in the young sprout yet. Little does he realize that the idea for the trip was really planted by the son, who wants for his part to see if there's life in the old stalk yet. Soon they meet a pretty midinette (Odile Versois)--just right for junior, father thinks. Then they meet a beautiful woman of the world (Elina Labourdette) --just right for father, junior thinks. Yet all at once the son is locked in mortal osculation with the older woman, and father is casting sheep's eyes at the girl, as she allows that "It's much more interesting for a woman if a man is older." So it goes, everybody barreling happily down the wrong side of the street. Then, of course, the emotional trafric--including an angry motor scooter belonging to the midinette's boy friend (Claude Romainj--gets too heavy, and age must be swerved.

Clearly, the main chance here is for broad boulevard farce, but Guinness chose discretion as the better part of comedy.

The laughs come as thick as tarts in Montmartre--the audience sees them coming and begins to grin--but the script (by Robert Buckner) mereiy adjusts its monocle, stares, bows ever so sligntiy, and declines to pick them up. Guinness obviously does not care so much if the audience gets the joke; he wants it to see the humor of his situations.

Many moviegoers will not get the idea, and many who do will not think it a very good one; and for such the scenario provides a few fine bits of very smart Alec. "Remember,'' he remarks vaguely to his son as they inspect their room in a French hotel, "that's not a foot bath." Best of all is the moment when Alec, having rashly climbed a tree to retrieve a badminton bird, staggers at last out of a series of vegetable ignominies. And where is the bird? It is not hard to imagine, as dazedly he picks the feathers, one by one, out of his teeth.

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