The New Pictures

A Tale of Two Cities (Rank), Dickens' melodramatic thriller about the best of times and the worst of times, has been bouncing on and off the screen like a handball ever since 1911, when James Morrison and Norma Talmadge nickered through three reels of heroism and anguish. The best of times arrived in 1935, when the late Ronald Colman came through with a portrayal of the novel's hero that had dash and dignity as well as the usual desuetude. In this latest attempt, British Actor Dirk Bogarde* gives it a game go, but he never quite fights his way out of a paper Carton.

True enough to the seven-leagued book, Carton is introduced as an untrustworthy, melancholy rummy--brilliant lawyer and all that, but essentially a tosspot. Bogarde flips his banister's wig over happily married Lucic, and from then on, both sides of the English Channel are awash in his nobility. Director Ralph Thomas leaps like a mountain goat from peak to peak: Lucie's love for Charles Darnay, the revolutionary mobs swarming in the streets of Paris, and finally Sydney Carton's self-sacrificing death to save Darnay. But inevitably the film must miss many of the deeper shadows between the peaks.

Damn Yankees (Warner). Hollywood's version of Broadway's long-running (2 1/2 years) marriage of baseball and Beelzebub seems sure to draw more customers than the Los Angeles Dodgers, even though it too requires a screen. In this case the screen is an asset. Co-Directors George Abbott (who did the stage musical) and Stanley Donen have lathered it with offbeat color effects and the kind of all-over-the-lot bounce that on Broadway could only be suggested. As a cinemusical, Yankees manages to steal home by a wide margin.

The middle-aged hero (Robert Shafer) is that most pitiable of men, a Washington Senators fan. An offhand mention that he would sell his soul for a long-ball hitter brings on Ray Walston, a crewcut, button-down Screwtape always willing to oblige. With a flick of the wrist, Walston turns paunchy Rooter Shafer into spring-legged, muscular Tab Hunter. Despite the fact that Actor Hunter holds a bat as if it were a canoe paddle, he hits .524 and steals 976 bases as the Senators roar in pursuit of the Yankees.

But off the field Hunter causes Ol' Debbil Walston no end of trouble by mooning about the wife he had to leave behind when he took on his new incarnation. "Wives," declares Walston woundedly, "cause me more trouble than the Methodist Church." In the longest-distance phone call in cinema history, he gets hold of Operative Lola (Gwen Verdon), still infernally seductive at the age of 172. Lola does not get what she wants, but the Senators do win the pennant and Hunter is mercifully transformed back into Robert Shafer.

As is usual in this sort of recital, hell's bells ring a lot more appealingly than any other place's. Gwen Verdon, cinching the top spot among current musicomedy dancers, is wonderfully comic as the vamp in What Lola Wants, wonderfully vampy in a comic drunk number, Two Lost Souls. Sidekick Walston has only one song--a paean to bygone atrocities called Those Were the Good Old Days--but he makes up the difference; lounging at the ballpark in Ivy League sports jacket, golf cap and smug smile, denouncing marital love as "gauche," he comes devilishly close to giving the movie flashes of true wit. Tab Hunter, despite his .524 batting average, does not belong in the same league.

Lucky Jim (Kingsley International) commands attention not for what it is but for what it certainly is not. Taken from the wry satiric novel by Kingsley Amis (TIME, May 27, 1957), the least rabid, best-humored and therefore most persuasive of England's Angry Young Men, the film denies its papa altogether. What had been a beguiling sidelong glance at Britain's vision of pie in the sky becomes a succession of pies in the eye. Jim (Ian Carmichael), a teacher of sorts and of history at a lower-bowge British university, vents his individualism by tying on a big one in front of his departmental chief, climbing into the wrong girl's bedroom, and burning holes through every blanket on his bed with a cigarette. He also wrecks a ceremonial parade at the university and passes out stone-cold in the middle of a lecture on "Merrie England."

These are fully acceptable items on the agenda of farce. But the producers have not only failed to capture Novelist Amis' sly house of protest; they cannot even get the picture through the Sennett. Actor Carmichael plays unlucky Jim with as much mugging as Central Park on a dark night, and the rest of the cast flounders in his frantic wake. A movie that might have been wackily profound is not even pro, and what should have been uproarious becomes, in the end, merely roarious.

* One of the top ten box-office favorites (1953-57) with British moviegoers; he is best known to U.S. moviegoers as the comic hero of the Doctor series.

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