The New Pictures

The Tall Men (20th Century-Fox). And the wind blew and the snow flew and before the censor could dig his way into the wilds of Montana and this script, Jane Russell is shacked up in a log cabin with Clark Gable, and there is nothing between them except grandmother's quilt. At night, while Jane lies sighing and stretching like a contented kitten, Clark gnaws happily at a piece of mule meat. "After a long ride," he explains, "I get hungry as a bear." In the morning Jane suggests a clubby breakfast. "I wish I was a peach tree," she sings, "a growin' in the ground . . . And if he wants them peaches of mine He'll have to climb the tree."

Pretty soon Cowpoke Clark is talking about a little vine-covered 'dobe on Prairie Dog Creek, but Jane won't hear of such "dirty, mangy, sod-bustin' livin'." She shoots straight: "Ah dream BIG." Clark fires back: "Ah dream SMAWWLLL." She takes up her quilt and walks. Enter the villain (Robert Ryan), who also dreams big. Ryan offers Jane the territory of Montana if she will let him assume her burden of quilt. She agrees, and he dresses her up like a real front-tier belle, but even as she is sprayed with Paris perfume, Jane cannot forget that able Gable. She watches him close while he drives Ryan's cattle from Texas to Montana. Come Sioux or stampede, jayhawker or dust devil, nothing bothers Clark--except, of course, the fact that he has to act. But like most of his parts, this one requires nothing much but his anxious little smirk. On the other hand, he seems comfortably conscious (as moviegoers will be awkwardly aware) that the winds which howl about his hairdo do not shake the trees in the processed backgrounds; and he arrives in Montana looking as fresh as a 54-year-old daisy can. At that point, Jane spreads her quilt for him again, and even the villain has to crawl. "He's what every boy wants to be when he grows up," Ryan reverently declares, "and what he wishes he had been when he's an old man."

The Trouble with Harry (Paramount) is the usual trouble with corpses: people can't let dead enough alone. A little boy (Jerry Mathers), playing in the woods, sees Harry first and runs to tell his mother (Shirley MacLaine). A retired tugboat captain and local poacher (Edmund Gwenn), who has just sent three rounds after a rabbit, finds Harry lying there with a little round blood spot on his forehead. "Oh, my!" he exclaims, for it is not hunting season. He is about to dispose of the evidence when the village spinster (Mildred Natwick) strolls by and. noticing Harry's distant manner, inquires politely, "What seems to be the trouble?" The captain explains, and the lady is most understanding. Their eyes meet. She blushes and offers him tea and a sympathetic muffin--after work.

Back comes the little boy with his mother. The captain hides. "Thank Providence!" the mother declares. "The last of Harry! Let's run home, and I'll make you some lemonade." Next, in startled succession, come the country doctor, a passing tramp, and the resident painter (John Forsythe), who calmly sits down and makes a sketch of the poor stiff. "Next thing you know," the captain splutters indignantly, "they'll be televising the whole thing." He and the painter fellow mull things over, decide to dig the hole for Harry together, and--after tea--they do.

Five minutes later, they are digging the body up again. The captain has discovered that his third bullet actually did kill the rabbit. "I think." he gasps, "that we are tangled up in a murder!" Half an hour later, they are digging him up for the second time. By this time. Harry is showing signs of wear, but Director Alfred Hitchcock is a man who understands that a good joke can't be kept down, and Harry does not rest in peace until he is ghouled for more giggles than he is really worth.

Horseplay with the corpse, and similar macabracadabra, has been a viable variety of humor in the human village since at least the Middle Ages, and few will seriously bother to accuse Hitchcock of bad taste. What he does sometimes invite in this picture is the charge of slack method. The comic pace often gets so slow that the moviegoer realizes he is, after all, at a funeral. The actors, too, sometimes behave pretty much like pallbearers, but the central idea is of such wormy charm that it takes more than an hour and a half to spoil.

The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing [20th Century-Fox). One fine day when the century was young, and men of insight were wondering what the peekaboo waist might lead to. John Barrymore took a chorus girl named Evelyn Nesbit to supper. He ordered a glass of milk, and floating a rose petal on it. murmured seductively: "That is your mouth." Furthermore, he declared. "You are a quivering pink poppy in a golden, windswept space." John was a poor young cartoonist in those days, and all he could pay was compliments, but there were many wealthy wolves on the prowl at Evelyn's door. At 16, she had adorned the cover of Collier's magazine in the famous Eternal Question portrait by Charles Dana Gibson, and she was known to thousands as the prettiest piece of fluff in the big city.

Among Evelyn's admirers was Stanford White, 47, the most prominent American architect (Manhattan's Pennsylvania Station, Washington Arch. New York University's Hall of Fame) of the day. and one of its leading quail hunters. One gaudy night, while Evelyn's mother was conveniently out of town. White blackly enticed the girl--or so she later testified --to a certain address on West 24th Street, which was entered through a secret door at the rear of a toy shop;. There, she said, he showed her into a room swathed in sound-stifling draperies from ceiling to floor, and containing a canopied bed with mirrors set in the top and sides. He offered her champagne. It tasted bitter. "When I became conscious again," she said later, "I didn't have any clothes on, and I was in bed." So was White. Evelyn screamed. "Be quiet," White told her. "It is all over now."

It was, of course, only the beginning. Evelyn "forgave him," and ran happily down the primrose path with her "Stanny," who pushed his "Kittens" on a red velvet swing in the "play" room, hung her in costly deshabille, and had the little beauty snapped while lying odaliciously on a polar-bear rug. "He was a brilliant, kind and fascinating man," Evelyn said later. "He showed me a new world of art and beauty."

The world came to an end when Evelyn wanted White to marry her. He sent her to finishing school instead, but before the term was out, Evelyn flounced off to Europe with a young Pittsburgh millionaire named Harry Kendall Thaw. It was a rough trip. Thaw was a mother's darling who had been turned loose on cafe society with too many marbles ($80,000 a year) in his pocket and not enough in his head. He was given to euphoric grandeurs--he once threw a $50,000 party for some French theater people--and sadistic glooms. With Evelyn he combined them: he rented an entire castle in Austria to please her, and then burst into her chambers one night to beat her insensible with a horsewhip. In public he was apt to fall on his knees before her, while fashionable company stared, and blubber: "Her boofuls. What does her want?" Nevertheless, Harry had $40 million, and Evelyn married him.

What made Harry crazier than anything was the thought of Stanford White, and what he had done to "Boofuls." He spoke of nothing but revenge, and one night in the cabaret on the roof of the old Madison Square Garden, he walked up to Stanford White's table, whipped out a little gold .22 and fired three bullets into the seducer's face and chest. "I did it," he said in a loud voice as White slumped in death, "because he ruined my wife and then deserted the girl."

The trial was perhaps the most sensational of its kind that the century has produced. The prosecution was conducted by District Attorney William Travers Jerome, relative of Winston Churchill's. "He struck," cried Thaw's lawyer (who based his defense on "the unwritten law"), "for the purity of the home ... of American womanhood." When Evelyn came to court, dressed like an innocent schoolgirl in Fauntleroy collar and demure chapeau, crowds almost killed her with kindness, and the riot squad was rushed to the scene. The first trial ended in a hung jury, but in the second, Thaw was acquitted on grounds of insanity.

He was sent to Matteawan asylum, and for the next 16 years was in and out of confinement, once after a sexual assault on a 19-year-old boy. He died of a heart attack in 1947. Evelyn (who got very little of Thaw's money until his death, when he left her $10,000) drifted from big vaudeville circuits into the little "speaks," and from there into a series of petty failures--a tea room, a cosmetic business--that were interspersed with two attempts at suicide. Now 70, she has recently been teaching ceramics in Los Angeles.

This picture, billed as Evelyn's life story (Fox arranged to pay her $45,000 as a consultant), plays a little fast with the loose facts. White (acted with worldly hauteur by Ray Milland) is presented as a high-minded fellow who loved Evelyn dearly, but could not bear to hurt his wife. Evelyn, who could scarcely have been prettier than Joan Collins makes her look, is made out to be as pure as the driven snow, at least in her intentions, even after that unfortunate Thaw (Farley Granger) had set in. Still the fiction is not much less exciting than the fact, and thanks partly to a magnificent $1,600,000 production in CinemaScope and DeLuxe color, it looks like the inside of a Fifth Avenue chippy's dream.

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