The New Pictures

All That Heaven Allows (Universal-International) is what Hollywood knows as a "woman's picture." The characters talk Ladies' Home Journalese, and the screen glows like a page of House Beautiful. The moviegoer often has the sensation :hat he is drowning in a sea of melted Dutter, with nothing to hang on to but the cliches that float past.

Gary Scott (Jane Wyman) is a smalltown widow with A Woman's Problem: after the late Fred, can there ever be Anybody Else? And there are The Children to be considered. Her boy and girl are away at school when Gary meets A

Man (Rock Hudson). The serious difficulty: he is Only A Gardener.

One day Ron asks Gary to come up and see his silver-tip spruce. Would it be The Right Thing to Do? Summoning all her courage, she Breaks Convention. At his farm, it is obvious that he Needs Looking After.

Ron asks her to marry him. "Isn't it enough," she then cries, "that we love each other?"--a remark which apparently means that, in Hollywood's estimation, the middle-class American woman would sooner give up her Honor than her Social Standing. Ron has to fall off a cliff before Gary realizes that love is more important than What Other People Think.

Doctor at Sea (Rank; Republic). The British last year released a little comedy about medical students, Doctor in the House, that was just what the doctor ordered for many U.S. moviegoers. This sequel is made to the same prescription for hilarity, but somehow it turns out to be something of a pill. The young medic (Dirk Bogarde, last year voted the most popular actor in Great Britain), is now licensed for practice, hires on as ship's doctor on a seagoing tramp. The captain (James Robertson Justice) is a Victorian horror known as "Father," who beetles above his timorous charges like a stuffed rhinoceros in a nursery school. Ship's doctor, as far as he is concerned, is merely the little chap who changes the captain's corn plasters in the morning.

The crew is a little more appreciative of the medical profession. "I hope," somebody asks with a lewd smirk, "you know all about Sailors' Troubles?" Troubles begin when the ship puts into a tropical port, and Father--who is determined to steal the social thunder from a rival captain--decrees a dance on the foredeck. "Bung ho!" cries a junior officer as he offers his shove potion (a cocktail made with surgical alcohol) to a passing frail. As she rapidly gets frailer, he coos insidiously: "I say, would you care to come and see the steering gear? It's rather an interesting one, really. I'd like you to see it." The doctor, for his part, meets a French girl (Brigitte Bardot) who is just coming out of a shower. "Oo," she says, and clutches her towel closer. "I suppose," he stutters apologetically as he backs out of her stateroom, "I'll be seeing more of you presently." He invites her down, in fact, for a look at his operating room, but even though the operation seems to be a success, the patience dies.

Man Who Never Was (20thCentury-Fox). One morning in the spring of 1943, the body of a man in the uniform of the Royal Marines was washed ashore on the coast of Spain. He carried valuable papers indicating that the next Allied thrust was to be in Greece rather than Sicily. Would the Germans get this skillfully planted misinformation? If they did, would they act on it?

They would and did, and British intelligence pulled off what was probably the major espionage coup of World War II. Based on the 1954 book by Ewen Montagu (TIME, Feb. 1, 1954), who masterminded the actual hoax, the film is largely faithful to its engrossing true story. Its chief flaw is some romantic embroidery concerning Gloria Grahame, who is done a bad turn both by the scriptwriter and the makeup man (she often looks as if she had been doused in oil for a Channel swim). An extra helping of thrills was also tacked on to make the Nazis seem less gullible than they actually were.

Clifton Webb sheds every trace of his Mr. Belvedere mannerisms to give a terse performance as Montagu, the intelligence officer who has more trouble selling his own high command than he does in hoodwinking the Germans. His toughest job is finding a proper body: that of a man of military age who has just died of pneumonia--so there will be enough fluid in the lungs to fool a Spanish prosector into believing the man has drowned. So long as the film remains a documentary, its detail is fascinating, whether it is the slow building of a personality and past life for the dead man or the grisly task of dressing the corpse in a hospital cellar as German bombs rain down. Stephen Boyd, as an Irish agent of the Nazis, gives some plausibility to the fictitious counterespionage sequence that ends the film, but Producer Andre Hakim would have been better advised to stick to the original story.

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