The New Pictures

Party Girl (Euterpe; MGM) is a caricature of an old-fashioned gangster picture, done in a clever but vulgar style. All the usual features are there, but all are comically exaggerated. The Little Caesar (Lee J. Cobb) is a sentimental old sweetie-pie with a heart almost as big as his sneer, who passes out diamond-crusted cigarette cases as if they were candy bars, gets a schoolboy crush on a studio still of Jean Harlow, and in fact has only one fault. He frequently rubs people the wrong way: out. The Big Mouthpiece (Robert Taylor), with his white-piped vests and pencil-line mustache, looks like a proper pallbearer at Dion O'Banion's funeral. The Chorus Girl (Cyd Charisse) is overwearily underworldly.

The violence is parodied too, but in a sly way that permits the moviegoer to lick his lips over the horror just before he sees the humor of a situation--or vice versa. One moment, for example, the audience is snickering at a dumb chorine, and the next it is staring aghast at her lifeless body in a bathtub that seems at first glance to be full of raspberry soda--very picturesque in Metro-color. And during a mob war, when a punk catches a packet, does he do the conventional clutch-and-crumple? Not at all. He explodes in the moviegoer's face like a ripe tomato--quite a bit of business in fast motion.

Unfortunately, the picture's plot (good girl helps bad guy go straight) fits the mood like a concrete overshoe, and the more than generous serving of cheesecake is pretty soggy stuff. In the fleshier episodes, Director Nicholas Ray seems to have striven to achieve a mood that is neither of the '30s nor of the '50s, but that might be said to contain the breast of both worlds.

Home Before Dark (Warner). "Charlotte, you know you shouldn't have coffee on an empty stomach." "Charlotte, you really do smoke too much." "Charlotte, you look so tired. Do go take a nap now." "Charlotte, we simply have to go to Boston and get you some decent clothes." Charlotte (Jean Simmons) has just come home from a mental hospital, where she has spent a year and undergone eight applications of electroshock, and her stepmother (Mabel Albertson) is determined to do her duty by the unfortunate creature--no matter how unpleasant it may be for both of them.

Unhappily, Charlotte's husband (Dan O'Herlihy), a college professor who is usually summed up by those who know him best and like him least as a "stuffed shirt," feels pretty much the same way. He has long since fallen out of love with his wife, but he is glumly prepared to make the best of a bad bargain. After all, a divorce would undoubtedly be harmful to his career. So he sleeps in another room, and punishes her in a thousand small unconscious ways for giving him a guilty conscience, and for keeping him from the woman he cannot, even to himself, admit that he loves--the wife's shapely stepsister (Rhonda Fleming).

As written, the story is a soap opera.

To get sympathy for the heroine, the moviemakers have made her so sweetly reasonable and the rest of the family so viciously irrational that the moviegoer may find himself confused about which belfry the bats are really in. But as played, the film is often a remarkably intense and intelligent study of close relationships--the rare sort of drama that demonstrates how soap opera at its best can bear a true and moving resemblance to life at its worst.

Chief credit clearly belongs to Mervyn (Quo Vadis, No Time for Sergeants) Le-Roy, the old Hollywood pro who directed the picture. Under his skillful guidance. Actress Simmons gives one of her most sensitive and graceful performances. And even Rhonda Fleming has been persuaded to make a variety of facial expressions that generally accord with what she is saying. But Dan O'Herlihy steals the show with one of the year's finest screen performances. Limited, insensitive, frightened, petty, penny-pinching, pompous, ambitious, but with it all somehow trying to be decent, trying to be kind, the husband he portrays is the pitiful and terrifying type of the natural-born philistine, a forlornly average man.

The Seventh Seal (AB Svensk Film-industri; Janus). Ingmar Bergman, the 40-year-old Swede who wrote and directed this powerful and peculiar picture, is the son of a well-known Swedish clergyman, and he says that the film was inspired by childhood memories of "the strange vegetation of medieval paintings and carved figures on ceilings and walls" in churches where his father preached. Working with several of the common themes of medieval art (the Black Plague, the Wise Fool, the Night Journey, Death Sawing at the Tree of Life, the Game of Chess with Death), Moviemaker Bergman has attempted "to express the modern dilemma" in the form of a medieval morality play--a tall order which he is seldom able to fill. The Gothic spirit had the natural beauty and mysteriousness of a growing thing. Bergman's Gothicisms, on the contrary, are as artificial and complex as paper roses, and spiritually they have about as much of the genuine Gothic mood and inwardness as the Mobil oil gargoyle. In Bergman's camera, the most numinous and vital symbols are somehow diminished into mere ideas; but then the ideas seem marvelously clever. And strong religious feelings are dissipated into a sort of arty, romantic, death-wishful mood that is often hard to distinguish from sentimentality; but then the mood is unfailingly hypnotic. Such qualities, along with the fact that the film is beautifully photographed and composed, should make it a very special sensation for moviegoers who like an occasional exotic tidbit--in this case, something that often has the horrible fascination of a candied tarantula.

Windom's Way (Rank) is a British attempt, made in burning earnest and blazing Eastman Color, to wrestle with a major sociological question: How has the Communist sickle reaped its impressive political harvests in Southeast Asia? Adapted from the bestselling novel (TIME, June 2, 1952) by James Ramsey Ullman, the picture gives an answer competently calculated to stir a moviegoer's emotions but somewhat unlikely to satisfy his intelligence. The Communists, the film argues, are all too often the only alternative to economic exploitation, official corruption, roughneck rule. The peasants see Red when the future looks black.

As its example, the story takes a village near a British rubber plantation. When the villagers strike for the right to plant their own rice, the plantation manager (Michael Hordern) promptly whistles up his personal bullyboys--the local police. When a mob storms the police compound, the government sends troops, and the villagers take to the hills and to Communism.

The story could have happened. But unfortunately it does not happen convincingly on the screen. The rubber boss is a caricature of Blimperialism. All too many of the Asians are portrayed by actors who are obviously not as brown as they are greasepainted, and who talk rather better English than is commonly heard in the House of Lords. And in most of the scenes of violence, what might easily have seemed real turns out to be merely colossal. Still, Peter Finch plays with skill, charm and conviction as the hero, and in Marne Maitland, who plays a sinister native official, the British have exposed the public to what looks like the nastiest Oriental menace since the Chinese rot.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.