The New Pictures

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

(20th Century-Fox). The hero of Sloan Wilson's bestselling novel was a young businessman in the classic Marquandary: Should he go in and win or get out and live? The book never really gave an answer. It was as slick as a gold-plated Dunhill lighter, and guaranteed not to burn anybody's fingers. The movie that has been made from the book relentlessly envelops every idea, obscures every issue in a smug smog of suburbinanity. The picture's hero (Gregory Peck) is a harried young commuter who decides that he cannot keep a wife (Jennifer Jones) and three children in Westport, Conn, on $7,000 a year. So he makes a play for the big money in the publicity game. It was a virtue of the book that, while it conceded that publicity men may sometimes be intellectually dishonest, it showed them as human beings too. It is a vice of the picture that it can't tell a human being from an overage Boy Scout. Greg is presented as a red-white-and-blue wonder boy just because he tells the boss man (Fredric March) a smart truth rather than a dumb lie. As a matter of fact, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit almost never wears a gray flannel suit. It doesn't matter much, anyway--except perhaps to the cloak and suit industry.

The Swan (MGM) is probably the only movie in history that can take advantage of a royal wedding as one of its promotion stunts. As MGM's luck would have it, this is a film in which Grace Kelly is wooed and won by a prince. The picture was begun just before Actress Kelly announced her engagement to Prince Rainier of Monaco, and it is released this week just in time to catch the wave of publicity kicked up by her marriage. The Swan will undoubtedly ride the wave a long, long way. A ticket to the movie can promise, in fact, rather better entertainment than an invitation to Monaco's cathedral, and it is a good deal easier to come by. At the real-life drama, after all, most spectators will catch only a few inadequate glimpses of a blonde girl from North Philadelphia and the hereditary proprietor of an amusement park. In the picture, on the other hand, the moviegoer is actually permitted to inspect the princess in her lacy smallclothes, and Grace in lace is every slender, statuesque inch a princess.

The Swan is based on the comedy of aristocratic manners written by Ferenc Molnar in 1920. This is the first time it has been brought to the screen since 1930, and Graustark has seldom been so charm ingly populated. To Actress Kelly's shy young princess, Alec Guinness plays the jaded prince who never would awooing go if his mother hadn't told him to. Louis Jourdan is the passionate young tutor who would if he could, but he can't overcome his belowstairs cringe.

The prince comes to have a wary look at Grace. He moves in confidently, guard high. She curtsies, he bows--too late. As she rises, the top of her head socks him on the button. End of Round One. They go out on the terrace. "A great many stars," he murmurs dreamily. Terrified of what he may say next, Grace coldly reports that some of them are even larger than the sun. End of Round Two.

Rather than risk Round Three, the prince gets lost until it is time to leave. Desperate, Grace's mother (Jessie Royce

Landis) commands her to dance with the tutor to make the prince jealous. The princess is aghast. "I would have sent for a duke from Vienna," her mother apologizes, "but there was no time . . . You'll wear gloves, of course, darling--long ones." Even with gloves, the tutor is too hot to handle. He sets the princess on fire, and by the time the blaze is finally under control, the rest of the flimsy plot has gone pleasantly up in smoke.

In the scenes of first love, Actress Kelly is exquisite. She kisses her man as though she had invented kisses just for him. Louis Jourdan partners her with easy skill, but Alec Guinness is the man to watch-especially when he goes to bed tied up in a mustache binder. The whole cast gets plenty of help from Director Charles Vidor, who has kept the color warm, the lighting kind, and everything moving in waltz time. But Vidor got plenty of help from the man who wrote lines such as the one that Aunt Symphorosa (Estelle Winwood) once squeaks in horror. "She's going to the Black Sea," she cries, "without any breakfast."

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