The New Pictures

Satellite in the Sky (Warner) is the sort of thing the British usually do very well done very badly. An attempt to duplicate the agonizing authenticity of such films as Breaking the Sound Barrier, it parades plot and props (including an enormous mocked-up spaceship) that could have been scissored by a small boy from the back of a cereal box. Its improbabilities do not begin or end with an unlikely character named Lefty who appears to pen notes with his right hand.

With less preparation than it takes to get a family of four off on a beach expedition, Her Majesty's Government sets out to fire a rocketship past the pull of earth's gravity, and at the same time touch off the world's first T-1 bomb, which is too big to be exploded on earth. A girl reporter (Lois Maxwell, about the only structurally sound object in Satellite) stows away on the unguarded vessel.

Science-minded viewers will find much to object to: e.g., in space the crewmen are heavy as sacks of potatoes while inside the ship, become weightless when they clamber outside to make repairs.

Otherwise, Satellite is rocketshipshape with searching dialogue ("You knew the rocket was my job when you married me"), a crisis (the bomb sticks to the ship's hull), an addled scientist (Donald Wolfit), and a final clinch between Reporter Maxwell and craggy-browed Pilot Kieron Moore. After 85 harrowing minutes Satellite makes port, leaving the corn barrier sadly shattered.

The Bad Seed (Warner) offers moviegoers a new sort of murderer: a crafty, coldblooded, eight-year-old blonde. Pig-tailed Patty McCormack has beautiful manners, a sweetly sensitive mother (Nancy Kelly) and a doting father (William Hopper). But accidents happen to the people around her. There was the nice old lady who fell down a flight of stairs--and the little classmate who won a penmanship medal Patty wanted, and then was found mysteriously drowned at a school picnic. Patty was the last to see either of them alive.

Nancy Kelly is troubled by these occurrences. When she finds the penmanship medal hidden in Patty's drawer, suspicion grows sharper, and she wrings a confession from Patty in a shattering crossexamination. Nor do the revelations come singly. Nancy has long had doubts about her paternity, and now her middle-class world collapses as she discovers that her own mother was a mass murderer who had fled justice. Even worse, she must face these mountainous horrors alone, since her husband has been called out of town.

While Nancy is bewilderingly facing up to the truth, little Patty is coolly taking the measure of another victim, a feebleminded janitor (Henry Jones), who thinks he is teasing the child in blaming her for her classmate's death. Probably the most chilling moment is when Jones discovers --too late--that his joking accusation is true. Before he can properly defend himself, Patty has burned him alive.

In William March's original novel, and in the Broadway hit adapted from it by Maxwell Anderson, this Gothic fable had a certain ghoulish conviction. While the theory that criminal tendencies can be inherited from criminal parents is ridiculous biology, it makes for bloodcurdling drama. To wipe what she believes is her tainted blood from the earth, the mother tries to kill herself and her daughter. In the novel and the play her suicide was successful, and the story's irony lay in the fact that the lethal child recovered with no one suspecting her crimes. Producer-Director Mervyn LeRoy clearly felt that that was too strong meat to serve moviegoers. In his film, both mother and daughter are saved by modern medicine, and then God steps in with a convenient thunderbolt to erase little Patty.

In other matters, however, Director LeRoy has been overly faithful to the play script. Actors march on and off the screen just as if they were making stage entrances and exits. Eileen Heckart, as the bereft mother of Patty's schoolmate, sobs through two long hysterical scenes that may have been effective theater but are merely repetitious film. And, as the horrors and corpses mount up (Patty is planning a fourth murder when the thunderbolt gets her), what had been eerie becomes ludicrous. At the film's end, LeRoy makes his final obeisance to the stage: all the characters smilingly take their bows, and Nancy Kelly--as she did during curtain calls on Broadway--puts Patty across her knee and gives her a spanking.

The Ambassador's Daughter (United Artists] Resolved: that a G.I. in Paris who has picked up a French model will act like a perfect gentleman. To this suppositious premise, Producer-Writer-Director Norman (Dear Ruth) Krasna devotes 102 Technicolored minutes of debate. The affirmative is passionately upheld by Olivia de Havilland, daughter of the U.S. Ambassador to France, who archly masquerades as a Dior mannequin to prove her point. The negative is defended by Adolphe Menjou, who plays a U.S. Senator determined to have Paris declared off limits to G.I.s, presumably on the grounds that it is too good for them.

To keep the argument going, Krasna brings onscreen those familiar enlisted men: the serious-minded, college-bred sergeant (John Forsythe) and his comical, nearly illiterate sidekick (Tommy Noonan), a pair whose tastes are so completely at variance that only Hollywood would think of them as buddies. Forsythe and Olivia romp through a standard Parisian romance--up the Eiffel Tower and down to the caves; along the Seine for lovemaking; to Notre Dame and the fashion shows. Along the way are substandard complications: Forsythe thinks Olivia has stolen his wallet; Olivia thinks Forsythe is trying to seduce her; Forsythe, eavesdropping on Olivia and her father (Edward Arnold), thinks they are lovers. But they triumph over these tedious misunderstandings and win through to love and marriage. It serves them right.

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