The New Pictures

The Iron Petticoat (MGM) is practically a remake of the old Greta Garbo-Melvyn Douglas comedy about how Lenin's glass-of-water theory is vanquished by Hollywood's slipper-of-champagne theory, and the world is saved for black lace undies. This version, however, might more accurately have been titled Ninotmuchka. Katharine Hepburn, doing her smooth-cheeked, trim-legged best to look like a Soviet with sex appeal, plays a MIG-wig in the Red air force who flies to the West in protest over a missed promotion. Bob Hope, a major in the U.S. Air Force, is assigned the "sensitive" task of inducing her to "embrace democracy." After that, the script--mostly by Ben Hecht, though he has wisely refused to acknowledge it (TIME, Oct. 15)--degenerates noisily into a lot of Hechtic foolishness. For a couple of reels the leading comedian plays it, riot for goofaws, but for the quiet snickers he is really better at getting; yet in the last half of the picture he goes right back to the cheap tricks that in recent years have made many moviegoers give up Hope.

The Young Stranger (RKO Radio) is a sensitive, winning job of moviemaking, and a stranger in more ways than one. It is that rare U.S. movie with not much plot, but with a sense of reality and people who ring true. The film was adapted by Robert Dozier, son of RKO Production Chief William Dozier, from his TV play, Deal a Blow, and is based on an incident that happened to him. Its point turns on the emotional gulf that separates a bright teen-age boy from his successful movie-producer father.

With deceptive casualness and no apparent drama, the scene is set as a perceptive camera follows the boy (James MacArthur) from his high school to his Beverly Hills home, and deftly begins probing into his relationship with his father (James Daly). On the surface, all seems calm enough, but the trouble is deep. It breaks out when the boy is charged with assault and battery after punching a bad-tempered theater manager who was tossing him out for annoying a customer. The boy admits to having been a nuisance, but denies he is an "assaulter and batterer." "It was self-defense," he cries, but his father will not believe him.

With no more than this true-life incident as a dramatic situation, the relationships among boy, father and mother (Kim Hunter) are brilliantly illuminated. In answer to his complaints about his father, his mother pleads, "Give a little. Other people want things too . . . Success takes an awful lot of time." Finally, when the boy bitterly cries that his father doesn't love him, his mother lets him in on how his father feels about him: "Your father once told me that the only thing in this world he really loved was you."

It doesn't help. Embittered by his father's persistent skepticism and cutting sarcasm, the boy blurts out the truth one night at dinner: "You don't even know me. How can you know if I'm telling the truth? . . . The only time I see you is at the crummy dinner table. You never talk to me. All you do is make speeches." Later, the mother, who for the last five of the 17 years she has been married has been thinking of separating, assures her husband, "He's a stranger to you." Pathetically, the father asks, "How do you talk to him? I can't say three words to him without offending him."

Though the final frame is too pat and plainly aimed at the box office, the film, with its pointed direction, effective writing and compelling acting, is one of those unusual surprises that Hollywood occasionally produces. Not the least remarkable thing about the movie is the youth of the four men most responsible for it. Producer Stuart Millar is 27, Director John Frankenheimer, 26, Writer Dozier, 25. Promising Actor MacArthur, 19, is the son of Actress Helen Hayes and the late Charles (coauthor of The Front Page) MacArthur. A freshman at Harvard, he will probably not be a young stranger to moviegoers for long.

Pantaloons (U.M.P.O.), a French satirical version of the Don Juan legend, catches famed Comic Fernandel with his pantaloons down. When Don Juan is captured, Fernandel, his servant, is forced to play the great lover to save his master's life. Fernandel is desperate. He is also scared. All the women in Toledo seem to be pursuing him, and he doesn't know what to do. There is nothing to it, his master explains. Women don't love Don Juan; they love the name and the legend: "Bearing, arrogance, elegance, insolence." Make them believe you are Don Juan, and they will love you just as if you were.

Fernandel puts on some fancy doublets, sticks out his chest and looks down his nose. For a while, a certain number of people are fooled. He is accused of seducing twelve women, including two virgins, in one night, and of killing 19 men at dawn. The penalty: he must burn at the stake. As the new executioner ties him up, he apologizes to the condemned man: "Excuse me if I'm rough. It's my first time." "Mine too," says Fernandel reassuringly. He doesn't burn, but it would be no great loss if the film did. It has a good idea and a better comedian. Unfortunately, the five writers who adapted the story did not have enough imagination and wit for one; and the director, wavering between comedy and romance, allowed Fernandel's talents to be frittered away.

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