The New Pictures

High Society (MGM) is simply not top-drawer. It should have been. The formula was sound: add music and color to a tested product, in this case Philip Barry's old hit, The Philadelphia Story. Producer Sol Siegel assembled a Who's Who cast. He talked Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra into teaming in a movie for the first time, snagged the services of Grace Kelly for her last screen appearance before embarking for Monaco, paid Cole Porter a reported $250,000 for his first original movie score in eight years, and hired Louis Armstrong to blow and gravel-growl his way through it. The result, unhappily, is strictly plebeian.

For no visible reason, John (Teahouse of the August Moon) Patrick's screenplay detours the action from the Philadelphia Main Line to the equally posh confines of Newport. There, frosty and imperious Tracy Lord (Grace Kelly) delicately dithers over the three men in her life: her ex-husband, C. K. Dexter-Haven (Bing Crosby), an aristocratic jazz devotee who insists on calling her "Sam"; her husband-to-be, George Kittredge (John Lund), a stuffy fellow; and brash Reporter Mike Connor (Frank Sinatra), who is on hand to cover the wedding for a picture magazine. The romantic field is soon winnowed down to Millionaire Crosby and Reporter Sinatra. Grace gets tight and thaws visibly. She dives into a swimming pool fully clad, and is fished out by the reporter (in the original version, they went swimming nude together), an episode which somehow persuades her that her ex-husband Crosby is O.K., or "yare." after all.

A good deal of the screenplay seems as dated today as the idle rich. Grace Kelly sings a duet with Crosby in a cool, innocuously pleasant little voice, does an alcoholic rumba with Sinatra, and looks thoroughly patrician, but she lacks the gawky animal energy that Katharine Hepburn brought to the 1939 play and the 1941 movie. Crosby seems as comfortable in the role of a singing millionaire as only a singing millionaire (which he is in real life) can be. but saunters through the part rather sleepily, without much of the old Bing zing. Sinatra plays the reporter like a dead-end kid with a typewriter. The two of them come off best together in a song-and-dance number, Well, Did You Evah?, in which Bing boo-boo-boos as Sinatra cock-a-doodle-doos.

But then there is Louis Armstrong. When Satchmo does an eye-rolling duet with Bing (Now You Has Jazz) or belts out a hot wedding march on his trumpet, High Society becomes really yare.

Bigger Than Life (20th Century-Fox) is the story of a medical case history wildly sensationalized with an eye for box-office returns. It will predictably outrage an army of doctors, frighten thousands of patients, and justifiably annoy drug manufacturers. The medical mischance it purports to describe was always rare, is now almost obsolete. The whole story is only remotely faithful to its original, one of The New Yorker's "Annals of Medicine" articles, a sober, sound piece by Writer Berton Roueche that was titled "Ten Feet Tall."

Producer James Mason tells the story of a public schoolteacher (acted by Mason himself) stricken with a rare and almost always fatal arterial disease. Only the wonder drug cortisone relieves his excruciating pain and prospect of imminent death. As implied by the movie, Mason becomes addicted to this nonhabit-form-ing drug (medical nonsense) and proceeds to go insane on overdosages (medical anomaly). But good old ly-hydroxy-n-dehydrocorticosterone is what keeps him alive and feeling ten feet tall, so he gobbles the stuff with ever more recklessness. At home and school, before the incredulous eyes of his wife, son and fellow teachers, Cortisone Fiend Mason roller-coasters over the peaks and down into the abysses of a drug-induced manic-depressive psychosis. One moment he weeps to bemoan his abject nothingness, the next he declares himself a genius destined to revolutionize the world's philosophy of education. When the P.T.A. fails to acclaim his self-styled greatness, Mason decides to make his own son his first guinea pig. But the boy does not respond well to overdosages of football and arithmetic, and Mason gets to thinking of the Biblical Abraham, decides the only thing to do is to offer the hapless boy to God as a human sacrifice. Mason's terror-numbed wife protests that God forbade Abraham to kill his son; Madman Mason brandishes a scissors, loftily replies: "God was wrong."

The men in white are usually sacrosanct heroes to Hollywood. But Bigger makes most of its doctors a Latin-spouting pack of hoddy-doddies not much brighter than Congo witch doctors. Not until Mason turns murderous do they at last hit on the shrewd deduction that he is suffering a mental upset from too much cortisone.

As movies go, Bigger Than Life is a first-rate thriller, like a peep show seen in a padded cell. It is superbly acted by Mason, hair-raisingly directed by Nicholas Ray. But medically, its greatest blunder is in casting cortisone as an intrinsically monstrous villain -- with only a perfunc tory bow to the truth that Mason has gone haywire on too many of a good pill.

Snorted one medical critic: "They could have made a movie about a man drinking himself to death on too many gallons of plain water -- that's possible too."

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