The New Pictures

Foreign Intrigue (Sheldon Reynolds; United Artists) is splendidly foreign, with its excellent color shots of the Riviera, Vienna and Sweden, but it is no more intriguing than a deciphered cryptogram reading "See Europe this year," or "Having a wonderful spy. Wish you were her." TV's Producer-Writer-Director Reynolds has concocted a cloak-and-dagger stew from his TV program of the same name, tossed sleepy-eyed Robert Mitchum into the cauldron and trusted that the simmering will wake him up. It does not. Mitchum yawningly tangles with a Babel of exotic accents, negligently disposes of spies, counterspies, a treacherous brunette (Genevieve Page), a seducible blonde (Ingrid Tulean). Drones one cobra-suave gumshoe to self-appointed Sleuth Mitchum : "You must be making progress. This morning I was ordered to kill you." Mutters Mitchum to the blonde: "I was lying about some things, but not when I said I loved you."

The plot has something to do with Mitchum's search into the past of his late employer who, it appears, was a big-moola blackmailer. Mitchum chases (and is chased) all over Europe before he even digs up this sore-thumb fact, while the blackmail victims--quislings who never quisled because Hitler never got around to invading their countries--earnestly try to bump Mitchum off their vile, traitorous scent. In all, Foreign Intrigue rates as the murkiest black-and-white color film of the year, lacking only a chase through sewers to lend it a more poignant aroma.

The Doctors (Kingsley-lnternational) is a French movie in which, as in most movies about doctors and most movies made in France, the part of the anatomy most affected is the heart. Based on Andre Soubiran's international bestseller, it tells of a brilliant but cynical Parisian medical student (Raymond Pellegrin) who acquires an understanding heart as a country doctor.

In the picture, as in the novel, the dramatic scalpel does not cut very deep. But there are vivid clinical scenes in hospital ward and peasant hovel, touching sequences of the young doctor's struggles with Auvergne's backward farmers, who prefer faith healers to doctors.

All the action is not in the operating rooms. There is the bawdy annual Bal de I'Internat, where celebrating medical students display large areas of healthily unsterilized flesh. Nor is the bed reserved exclusively for the patients. On occasion, the doctor is discovered in one too.

Pardners (Paramount) is an ironic title for this tame latest in the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis series, for the comedy partners recently announced that they were splitting up--and a good thing, too. A rambunctious blend of gags and nags,

Pardners casts Jerry Lewis as a sort of Tom Mixed-up character, a would-be cowpoke who is given to riding a mechanical horse in his Manhattan mansion. This prone ranger suddenly finds himself a sheriff out west, combating a gang of masked raiders. But, with the help of his singing pardner, Dean Martin, he blunders his way to triumph over the baddies. He falls off a horse, ropes himself with a lariat, spills tobacco when he tries to roll a cigarette. It's like that.

Trigger-quick on wisecracks, some of them corny even for a simple-minded oater, this horseplay opera is a Technicolored remake of the 1936 Bing Crosby musical, Rhythm on the Range. Its chief assets: four new songs by Sammy Cahn and James Van Heusen, two leading ladies (Lori Nelson and Jackie Loughery), and a personable prize bull named Cuddles, who provides a beefy relief from the Martin and Lewis brand of ham.

Private's Progress (Boulting Bros.; D.C.A.) is a novelty among British war films; instead of focusing on the stiff upper lip of the British Tommy, it tickles his soft underbelly. The film is irreverently dedicated to the goldbricking gladiators of World War II: "To all those who got away with it," adding, "The producers gratefully acknowledge the official cooperation of absolutely nobody."

It is war a la Wodehouse. Private Stanley Windrush, played with a slightly pained, Bertie Woosterish expression by Ian Carmichael, progresses erratically from Gravestone Barracks, where he wakes up "feeling a little fragile," to an officers' selection board, where he confounds psychiatrists and loses his pants during an obstacle run. In the course of the hurlyburly, Windrush absorbs some of the rules of artful dodging in the service, e.g., "Never give your right name to anybody; otherwise they've got you," gets involved in a harebrained "Operation Hatrack" conceived by "Uncle Bertie," otherwise Brigadier General Bertram Tracepurcel. Uncle Bertie's scheme: to disguise a platoon of British Tommies as Nazis, send them into Germany to snatch a cache of art treasures which Uncle Bertie plans to sell on the British black market.

U.S. moviegoers may be baffled by private jokes that put Britons in stitches, e.g., a major who abuses underlings by bellowing. "You're an absolute shower!" --an abbreviated allusion to a British army phrase which might be paraphrased as a deluge of offal. But the skilled producer-director-writer team of John and Roy Boulting (Seven Days to Noon) keeps all this nonsense spinning along blithely, has made Private's Progress a sort of British-accented Keystone Kaper, with pratfalls, chases and cuties in uniform that any nationality can relish without special training.

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