The New Pictures

Run Silent, Run Deep (Hecht, Hill, Lancaster; United Artists) runs noisy, runs shallow. But it gives the moviegoer who is in the market for thrills a fairly good run for his money. Based on the 1955 bestseller by Navy Captain Edward L. Beach (at that time President Eisenhower's Navy aide), the film gets under way as Commander Clark Gable, U.S.N.. loses his submarine in Japan's Bungo Strait. Desked in Honolulu, he strikes for another command and sails for revenge. But there is a hitch: the command that Gable gets had previously been ticketed to Lieut. Burt Lancaster, who stays aboard as Gable's executive officer and makes no bones about his disappointment. What's more, the crew is in Lancaster's corner. When Gable pours on the drill, they fall to without a grumble, but when he ducks a Japanese submarine, they mutter that he is "running scared." And when Gable, in defiance of orders, heads for Bungo Strait, "the graveyard'' where at least four U.S. subs lie buried, a deputation waits on the exec and asks him to take over the boat. After a while, he does. And yet, is Gable really wrong? Is Lancaster really right? Fortunately, the moviegoer gets something more interesting to think about from time to time--mostly some good sea fights. Otherwise, it's damn the torpedoes, half speed ahead.

Stage Struck (RKO Radio; Buena Vista) is a vigorous second blossoming, this time in hothouse Technicolors, of Morning Glory, the sentimental success of 1933. First time out, the blooming little idiot of the title role was portrayed by a young comer named Katharine Hepburn, and the performance won her an Oscar and made her a star. This time around, the stage-struck heroine is played by a young (19) comer named Susan Strasberg--well known on Broadway for her work in The Diary of Anne Frank--and the performance seems sure to win her Hollywood stardom too.

With due respect to the abilities of both actresses, they could hardly miss. As written, the part has plenty of red blood in it, and it is colored up still further by the fact that Actress Strasberg, with girlish charm and intensity, opens her veins into almost every line.

"Excuse me!" burbles the breathy little ingenue who calls herself Eva Lovelace as she bears down on a famed actor she has not been introduced to. "You're Robbert Harley Hedges, aren't you?" Actor Hedges (Herbert Marshall) achieves a smile. "I've played them all," she airily lets him know, as one trouper to another. "Nora in The Doll's House, Madame Ranevsky in The Cherry Orchard" He: "Where was all this?" She: "With the Mummers in Ordway, Vermont."

Just then a well-known producer (Henry Fonda) walks in, and she gives him the old cold cream. "I reverence the things you've done in the theater, Mr. Easton ... I read La Dame Souriante in French, and I admire your courage in doing it." Easton (edging away): "I'm sorry. Miss Lovelace, but we are fully cast." But a minute later she bursts into his office to say, "Thank you for taking such a personal interest," and while she's at it, she takes time to bestow her condescension on a famed actress (Joan Greenwood) who happens to be there. The actress, who does not seem to appreciate these attentions, returns them gracefully: "The theater's gain is Macy's loss."

Good stagy stuff, and more to come. When the girl finally gets a tryout for a walk-on as a French peasant ("He's playing cards in the bar"), she flunks it spectacularly by scuffing onstage like a marked-down Magnani and declaring in a studied crescendo: "He is at the estaminet playing [pause] BEZIQUE!" And when a young playwright takes her to an opening-night party, she gets drunk, embarrasses him and bores everybody else by climbing on the nearest eminence to recite "0 Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?" But suddenly nobody is bored. She is reading her lines with a kind of wild natural sweetness that fills the silly room with a resonance of Renaissance.

After the others go. the producer takes her to bed, and after that he kicks himself hard. "I got involved . . . She's everything I don't have time for." Next time she calls, somebody tells her he has gone to Jamaica. But he'll be sorry, of course. And he'll be glad, when his big star walks out, that the little nobody from Ordway, Vt. is there to walk into the big part--et cetera.

The finish, though, is not quite what the audience expects. The almost sappy major chord of the conclusion is suddenly modulated into a slyly suspenseful and sophisticated dissonance. The sophistication may not be real, but it is realistic. Broadway is pretty much like what Scriptwriters Ruth and Augustus Goetz and Director Sidney Lumet say it is.

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