The New Pictures

Slaughter on Tenth Avenue (Universal) is the sort of stevedore special Hollywood has been serving up ever since On the Waterfront, when the moviemakers discovered that the public likes a pier with a yegg in it.

The story this time is lifted from the book, The Man Who Rocked the Boat, in which William Keating described his adventures on the waterfront as a racket-busting assistant to Manhattan's district attorney. An honest pier boss (Mickey Shaughnessy), who refuses to holler uncle when the musclemen apply the pressure, is burned with half a dozen garlic-smeared slugs, and Keating (Richard Egan) is assigned to make the case against the goons who got him. He gets nowhere fast. The longshoremen, as usual, are afraid to talk. The victim himself refuses to "rat." The affable union boss (Walter Matthau) plies the racket-buster with bribes and threats. His chief witness disappears. But somehow the interest remains.

The show is carefully written (by Lawrence Roman), carefully directed (by

Arnold Laven), carefully acted. Dan Duryea, as the mouthpiece for the indicted hoods, is as tricky as watered silk, and Actor Egan shows himself, as usual, a competent actor of a popular Hollywood type: the Neanderthal man in the Brooks Brothers shirt.

Razzia (Kassler) is a harrowingly realistic gangster picture--perhaps the most painstaking study of criminal methods that has ever been made in an entertainment film.

Razzia means raid in most European languages, and the picture describes an attempt by the French narcotics squad to break up an international drug cartel. Raw materials: principally opium--smuggled from the Balkans in the wall of the men's room in a day coach. Manufacture: by a derelict chemist in a well-equipped laboratory in the cellar of a shabby frame house in a rundown suburb. Distribution: by courier to retail outlets, by an infinite variety of special arrangements between buyer and seller. Protection: by hired thugs--a small outfit by U.S. standards, but what they lack in numbers they make up in enthusiasm.

The documentary approach is followed, indeed, into details and dialogue that are not generally regarded as suitable for presentation on the screen. Some of the earthiest words in the French language are bandied freely; many ways to take drugs are suggested; and homosexuals are the subject of some scenes.

No doubt these scenes are included partly because they are sensational; but it is also true that the makers of this movie are concerned, in a spirit not completely commercial, with authenticity. The whole picture--except perhaps for the Hollywood ending--carries a strong conviction to the moviegoer that what he is seeing is really happening; and the conviction is strongest when the camera is watching Jean Gabin, who is just right as un gros legume--a big vegetable.

Sad Sack (Hall Wallis; Paramount), according to its foreword, "could never have been made . . . without the cooperation of the United States Army and Air Force"--a charge as serious as any made against the armed forces since Pearl Harbor. In the second picture that he has done without Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis is cast as a character suggested by the hero of George Baker's well-known comic strip, the sort of unmilitary material for which the drill sergeant can find no proper noun. When Jerry camouflages a tank, the Army can't find it. When he jeeps his buddies home from a beer bust, he mistakes the bunkhouse number, and they all wake up next morning in a WAC shack. The jokes, in short, are encrusted with service stripes, and in his frantic attempts to make them seem younger. Comedian Lewis merely makes himself seem infantile. Indeed, it is now possible to answer those who wondered what Lewis ever needed Martin for. He was the bib for the drivel.

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