The New Pictures

The Matchmaker (Don Hartman; Paramount) is Shirley Booth, and no one can match her when she is on the middle-aged make. Waving her umbrella like a fairy godmother with a poltergeistic wand, she stumbles, rumbles and cannily bumbles her way through the title role of Thornton Wilder's 1956 stage success in a manner that moviegoers with a taste for old-fashioned American farce will have no trouble savoring.

As Mrs. Dolly Levi, a widow of parts, Actress Booth plays an erstwhile palm reader and dispenser of medicine oil whose present project is snaring Horace Vandergelder (Paul Ford), possibly the richest merchant in all Yonkers in 1884. Her mission is complicated by the merchant's preference for finance rather than romance. "Marriage," he snorts, "is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder." Even worse, the old skinflint seems set on marrying somebody young. Author Wilder's solution, which involves exploding tomato tins, a pair of Vandergelder's clerks uprooting the City of New York, a pretty milliner whose rival is purely mythical, and a demoniac dinner party, makes no sense at all--but does make scatterbrained nonsense.

Wilder and Scriptwriter John Michael Hayes coat this slapstick with lavish layers of roguish dialogue. If Actress Booth blinks at the camera and confides, "Money is like manure--it's not worth anything unless it's spread around," Actor Ford is there a moment later to lament: "Oh for the days when women were sold for a few cows." Chief Clerk Tony Perkins, who seems to be trying to recapture Jimmy Stewart's lost youth, paws the ground and in that familiar marble-mouthed drawl reckons that he might try kissing a girl: "I'm six foot two and a half tall; I've got to start some time." Replies Robert Morse, his shy fellow clerk: "I'm five foot five, so it isn't so urgent for me." Brought off at breakneck speed amidst a kaleidoscope of neck-breaking pratfalls, this chatter and unabashed clowning by all hands turn Matchmaker into a highly amusing farce.

The Defiant Ones (Stanley Kramer; United Artists). Throw together a couple of unknown film writers, an original screenplay never tested in bookstalls, on television or on the stage, a budget of less than $1,000,000 to cover the cost of old-fashioned black-and-white photography and monophonic sound, and what bubbles up? For Producer-Director Stanley Kramer, at 44 one of the most skillful chefs in the business, the result of putting such ingredients together is savory cinema, free of froth and sharply seasoned.

Kramer's recipe is to pick up a story shell of mollusk-like simplicity and crack it open almost raw to lay bare the flesh beneath. In Champion (1949), his hero was a heel who could hit, and would hit anybody to get to the top; in High Noon (1952), a lawman alone against four avenging gunslingers. The Defiant Ones, in terms of its plot, is equally spare: two men escape from a Southern chain gang and are hunted down by a sheriff and his posse. But from a stark, grimly witty script by Movie Newcomers Nathan E. Douglas and Harold Jacob Smith, Director Kramer makes a story of human understanding slowly carved out of two men's common violence, loneliness and desperation.

White-Boy Joker Jackson (Tony Curtis) and Black-Boy Noah Cullen (Sidney

Poitier), chained together at the wrist, are the only two to escape when a prison truck cracks up in a ditch. Linked but loathing, they stumble through swampland, nearly drown fording a river, nearly wrench their arms from their sockets clawing out of a deep clay pit. When they pause, it is not to rest but to spit forth their hatred. Telling Poitier why he is a "nigger," Curtis says: "It's like callin' a spade a spade. I'm a hunky. I don't try to argue out of it." Replies Actor Poitier: "You ever hear tell of a bohunk in a woodpile, Joker? You ever hear tell of 'catch a bohunk by the toe'?"

A farm boy happens upon them, leads them back to the burrow where he and his deserted mother (Cara Williams) live. The woman helps them smash the chain, spends the night with Joker Jackson, and persuades him to flee with her while Cullen heads overland to hop a northbound freight. In a scene that would be the worst sort of corn if the script faltered, Curtis learns that the woman has directed Poitier through a quicksand bog. Their painfully borne chain, even broken, has bound them irrevocably together, and Curtis plunges after him to sure capture by the law. Behind the coupled heroes, the moviemakers have sketched a mud-grimed tableau of the blood-happy townsmen giving chase and a soul-weary sheriff--played to sunken-eyed, raspy-throated perfection by Theodore Bikel. If Sidney Poitier's wild-eyed, bare-fanged portrayal of Cullen is overwrought, it has at least prodded Teen-Agitator Curtis into the first performance of his career that will incline the old folks to a modest whoop.

The Hunters (20th Century-Fox) was made with "the cooperation of the Defense Department and the U.S. Air Force," who obviously hope that moviegoers will smile tolerantly at the story and concentrate on admiring the zooming jets. Bob Mitchum plays a Korean war fighter pilot who falls in love with his wingman's wife. The triangle could hardly be less isosceles.

The long-suffering wingman is Lee Philips, whose fear of combat has led him to booze his way into his wife's disaffections. He gets popped by a North Korean MIG, bails out over enemy territory. Mitchum, of course, has only to scoot home and catch a quick shower in order to nest down with the missing flyer's spouse (May Britt). Instead, the red-blooded rat turns true blue; he bellylands his plane, heaps Philips over his shoulder and reels (about 25) back to their own lines. There Philips' repentant wife waves disconsolate farewell to Mitchum, but he does not even notice. He is staring at those vapor trails in the sky.

Producer-Director Dick Powell wisely spends a minimum amount of time munching on this knackwurst, trains his cameras as much as possible on the stirring capers of F-86s banging about the sky. He would have been even smarter to hire some tanker planes and never bring the jets down at all.

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