The New Pictures

Beautiful but Dangerous* (Malenotti; 20th Century-Fox) is ugly but harmless. The Eastman color print is riotously red --but then it will keep the image of Gina Lollobrigida green in the moviegoer's memory. The words that come out of the loudspeaker bear almost no relation to the movements made by the actors' lips--but then it is comforting to imagine that the actual Italian dialogue is not as silly as the English translation. As for the plot, Scriptwriter Cesare Cavagna has assured the public that it presents the life story of Lina Cavalieri, a well-known Italian soprano in the days before World War I, "as Lina herself wanted it told." La Cavalieri died in 1944. and the story makes little use of the known facts of the diva's life. As a matter of fact, the script sometimes sounds as if it had been written by a Ouija board.

"I can give you anything you want," the sinister singing master (Robert Alda) mutters hoarsely as he munches on the heroine's bared shoulder, "clothes, jewels, money!" Coldly Gina spurns him, for her heart belongs to a dashing young Russian prince (Vittorio Gassman). But alas, her love is hopeless, for what can a poor little orphan girl mean to "the favorite nephew of the Czar"? Besides, she is in Rome and he is far away in St. Petersburg, "a cold, silent city covered in snow and mystery." Yet sometimes he comes to Paris--"Paris! where everything is gay, sparkling and romantic," and where Gina is soon the queen of the Folies Plastiques and the rage of the age.

Her life is gay but her heart is sad. "Beautiful, elegant, famous. Bah! What does it matter?" she asks her mirror. But perhaps some day her prince will come--and one day he does. "We've met only tonight," he murmurs (for in the glamorous actress he does not recognize the poor little orphan girl), "but I feel I have known you always." He leads her out onto the terrace; he leads her down the garden path. But the heroine gets her revenge. The unhappy man is forced to listen as Gina, in her very own voice, sings an aria from La Tosca.

Cowboy (Phoenix; Columbia). "Ef yew ask him fer whut's comin' in the middle of a rivah craossin', he'll pay aoff, an' he'll pay aoff in dry bills"--that's Glenn Ford, a big cattleman from El Paso. "He's just young and full of frijoles"--that's Jack Lemmon, a Chicago hotel clerk. Ford signs Lemmon as a trail hand, and the rest of this picture (suggested by Author Frank Harris' memoirs of the 18703, My Reminiscences as a Cowboy) describes with an engaging mixture of saddlesore truth and reach-for-leather fiction what a cowboy's life was like in the Old West, and how an Easterner learned to live it.

The first thing Lemmon learns is that a horse is a treacherous animal--a friend to your face but an enemy to your rear. He also learns to sleep on the bare ground, to catch naps in the saddle, to laugh at the cowboys' jokes--and they laugh hardest when the joke is practical. One day, just for the hell of it, somebody wraps a "prairie eel" around somebody else's neck, and everybody gives the victim the heehaw until the rattlesnake gives him a bite. It is then that the greenhorn learns what a human life is worth on the trail. As the man lies dying, the other hands sit around and beat their gums about this and that, as if nothing at all unusual were going on. "I think he's dead," one of them says at last. "Dig it deep," Boss Ford replies, "so's the kyoats doan git 'im." And at the graveside he says unemotionally, "He was a good man with cattle. Allus did the best he knew how." And they throw on the dirt.

Unfortunately, it does not take much of this to turn the hotel clerk into a genuine Hollywood cowboy, and as soon as he gets back to that Chicago hotel, he proceeds to demonstrate his he-manity. Superb in a steaming tub he sits, swigging his quart and sucking his Havana and languidly, when the spirit moves him, blasting away at the roaches on the walls with his trusty .45.

*Not to be confused with any of the many other Beautiful but movies, e.g., Beautiful but Broke, Beautiful but Dumb, Beautiful, but Dummies.

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