The New Pictures

Bedevilled (MGM) is an ecclesiastical striptease that comes repulsively close to what might be called priestitution. A young American (Steve Forrest), on his way to study for holy orders, stops over in Paris to take in the sights. Pretty soon he takes one of them (Anne Baxter) for a ride in a cab; from there the picture goes to heaven in a hack.

It seems that Actress Baxter, a blues belter who is apt to wear as many as several sequins at once, has gone from bed to worse: murder. The hero tries to save her soul, but he keeps hankering after her body. At one point, they stash away in an attic. As she rubs against him, he hesitates, looking less like St. Anthony before the Devil than an aging shortstop in confrontation with an alluring calorie, and is lost when the sound track weighs in with the kind of unhealthy music that passes censorship but might better be evaluated by a Wassermann test. In the end, of course, the spirit proves stronger than the flesh, and the heroine is not swived but shrived.

In short, the nicest thing about this picture is its piety--and that is merely hypocritical.

Strategic Air Command (Paramount) is one soaring, supercolossal recruiting poster. It tells the story of the men and machines whose job it is to be so good at their job that they will never have to do it. SAC is "the finger," as airmen call it, of the U.S. air arm, the corps that may have to carry The Bomb. The point of this picture: "We're the only thing that's keeping the peace." Though the story seldom gets off the ground, the planes do, and the camera follows them through some of the most majestic scenes of flight ever filmed.

James Stewart, as the picture begins, is a $70,000 third baseman for the St. Louis Cardinals. He is called back into the Air Force as a lieutenant colonel and assigned to SAC. He hates it at first, but he takes his lumps in the B-36s (including a crash in Greenland at 40DEG below), goes on to get his kicks from the world's fastest (more than 600 m.p.h.) operational jet bombers, the B-47s. By the time his tour is up, he is ready to sign on with the Air Force as a professional.

Actor Stewart, as always, is an infinite gangle of charm. He combat-flew his way up to full colonel and command of a B-24 wing in World War II, but to watch him shyly fumbling, in his usual screen style, at the controls of the world's fanciest yo-yo may give less comfort to his friends than to his country's enemies. Actress June Allyson, who looks so normal it almost seems she was not born but arrived by statistics, has been Jimmy's wife before (in The Stratton Story and The Glenn Miller Story), and by now she can play the part in her sleep. Sometimes, in fact, she seems to do so. Frank Lovejoy, who plays General Curtis E. LeMay. the tough boss of SAC, does an excellent imitation of that famous cigargoyle.

The true stars of SAC, however, are not its people but its planes. The scenes of flight take up almost half of the film. Tremendous B-36s, their bright wings spreading out for 230 feet, reduce the world's sky to a mere pond they drift across like mystic swans. The B-47s flash like teeth in moonlight, and a comical pelican of a Globemaster gulps an entire tank truck before one's eyes. In the end, SAC passes from the understandably lyrical to the outright reverent. When the camera glides in for its first look at a B-47, the sound track bursts into organ peals of religious music, a strangely sacred serenade to one of the world's most powerful instruments of destruction.

Best bit: "Any kids?" Jimmy asks his sergeant (Henry Morgan), who growls happily, "One on the ramp, one in the hangar."

The End of the Affair (David E. Rose; Columbia), based on Graham Greene's 1951 novel, is a sanctimonious soap opera involving a triangle in which God is cast as the hypotenuse. During World War II, the wife (Deborah Kerr) of a British civil servant (Peter Gushing) falls in love with a well-known author (Van Johnson). One day, during an assignation, they hear a peculiar sputtering sound in the air. Van rushes downstairs to see what is the matter. A buzz bomb explodes near by, and he is crushed beneath debris. When Deborah finds him, she thinks he is dead. She stumbles upstairs dazed, falls on her knees and prays for the first time in years. In her agony she promises God that if only He will bring her lover back to life she will give him up forever. A moment later Van staggers into the room.

The rest of the story is concerned, at exhausting length, with the struggle between God and Van Johnson for the lady's heart and soul. God wins, of course, but the victory seems in this film to be a minor one. Actor Johnson has learned a lot. since the days when he was only a commercial grin, but the profounder passions are still over his head. However, Actress Kerr gives him little to get profound about. She plays Greene's passion flower with all the vitality of a nasturtium.

The actors, nevertheless, are no worse than the script, and somewhat better than the direction of Edward Dmytryk. who must assume most, though not all, of the blame for what has gone so sadly wrong with this picture. The novelist himself has an imperious finger in the pie. He has written about God with a familiarity that verges, as Dmytryk and his company have interpreted it, on unintentional contempt. Where Greene merely shows a venial affection for the theatrical aspects of religion -- miracle, conversion, intellectual paradox -- the film attempts to drag the Deity through the theater like a dancing bear.

Tight Spot (Columbia) offers Ginger Rogers as a melancholy dame who must ask herself whether it is nobler in the mind to be a jailbird or a dead pigeon. Edward G. Robinson, the Government attorney, drags her out of a nice warm prison to offer a very cold proposition indeed: Will she turn state's evidence against a powerful underworldling in return for a reduction in sentence? While Ginger thinks it over, she trollops around her hotel suite, munching breast of guinea hen and the biceps of a policeman (Brian Keith) at Government expense. When Keith declines to give his pound of flesh, Ginger growls: "You [men] are all alike. You only got different faces so we girls can tell you apart." How she can tell Keith apart from any one of a dozen other young comers in Hollywood is more than a moviegoer can say, but at least there is no doubt about Edward G. Robinson. He's the one who looks like Edward G. Robinson.

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