The New Pictures

The Happy Road (MGM) leads from a Swiss international school for children to gay Paree, and its steeplechase is a fairly pleasant mixture of the classic slapstick hide-and-go-seek elements of old-time Keystone comedies. The hiders, on the lam from teachers and texts, are two kids, ably though often too cutely played by Bobby Clark and Brigitte Fossey. (Pipes Bobby: "I don't think it's good for parents to be left alone too much!") The seekers are Bobby's widowed father (ProducerDirector Gene Kelly), a Paris-based U.S. businessman who sneers at the French as inefficient foreigners, and Brigitte's divorced mamma (Barbara Laage), a svelte French pastry who has broken a bank in Monte Carlo and now plans to marry it.

The hooky-players soon assume the stature of resistance heroes to the French school kids who improbably help speed them on their way. On their trail, Kelly and Barbara feud continuously over whose child is the culpable genius of the escape. At one point the young refugees, trapped amidst some NATO ground maneuvers, totally thwart the efforts of a pushbutton general (hammishly caricatured by Michael Redgrave) to pinpoint them, even outwit his dread Operation Meatloaf ("Not intended for use until the Red army is actually in Trafalgar Square"). Amusing except when it pleads ponderously for international understanding, The Happy Road eventually reunites everybody in Paris, hints that Gene and Barbara will henceforth travel on the family plan.

Saint Joan (Preminger; United Artists) performs, with the greatest of ease, the feat of turning Shaw into pshaw. Given what is probably the master's masterpiece, Producer-Director Otto Preminger (The Man with the Golden Arm) has concluded what is certainly the feeblest of the five films--Pygmalion, Major Barbara, Caesar and Cleopatra, Androcles and the Lion are the others--that have been made from Shaw's plays.

The most obvious mistake in Preminger's Joan is Preminger's Joan--a charming, shrinking young girl named Jean Seberg, aged 18, whom the director "discovered," according to the picture's panting publicity, in the vicinity of Marshalltown, Iowa. Actress Seberg, with the advantage of youth, the disadvantage of inexperience, is drastically miscast. Shaw's Joan is a chunk of hard brown bread, dipped in the red wine of battle and devoured by ravenous angels. Actress Seberg, by physique and disposition, is the sort of honey bun that drugstore desperadoes like to nibble with their milk shakes.

Director Preminger seems to approach Shaw's classic with a heavy Germanic reverence that sorts ill with the trustbusting, wit-snapping Shavian spirit. His scriptwriter, Novelist Graham Greene, has adapted Shaw's play to the screen almost word for word. The result is talk, talk, talk. And even when the talk is good Shawmanship, Preminger and his cast manage to make it bad acting. Indeed, the whole company plays with such clumsiness that the expert Sir John Gielgud, as Warwick, has to pick his way to histrionic success like a first-string halfback dodging through the scrub.

Beau James (Paramount) offers Bob Hope springing eternally in the shoes of New York City's late, dapper Playboy-Mayor Jimmy Walker. So much is Beau Bob's type-cast flippancy like Jimmy's that Hope needs only to be himself to portray convincingly the sleek, fun-prone Irishman who for six years symbolized the big town's Prohibition era. Based on Gene Fowler's biography, the movie shows Walker on the dead run--from Tammany Hall to the hustings, from speakeasies to easy speeches, from his glaciated wife (Alexis Smith) to,his showgirl playmate, Betty Compton (Vera Miles).

A prologue by Gossipist Walter Winchell presents the picture as "a love story" dealing with Walker's crush on his city. But New York, roaring from the frolicsome '205 into the whimpering early '30s, never really makes the grade as Jimmy's leading lady. Nonetheless, Walker crashes through as an ardent wooer, especially in the sequence when he warbles his own song, Will You Love Me in December As You Do in May?, in sundry minority keys and dialects, depending upon the Jewish, Italian or Negro texture of his audience. As weak as he was lovable and irresponsible, Jimmy is factually shown as a gaudy municipal figurehead who "never knowingly took a dime dishonestly." As for the boodlers who ran city hall while he was painting the town with red ink, he sadly laughs off both their corruption and his job in his impromptu resignation to booers in Yankee Stadium: "I wasn't the only chump in this city. It took a lot of you to elect me!"

The trouble with Beau James lies in its reluctance to admit that Beau was also a top-hatted tramp, a living reproach to decent government, whose antics were more pitiful than playful. In whitewashing its whoopee-making clown, the movie, already too long, is just as irresponsible as its taxpayer-take-the-hindmost hero.

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