The New Pictures

The Doctor's Dilemma (Comet; M-G-M). The Fabian intellect and the Wagnerian soul were the lion and the unicorn of Bernard Shaw's personal mythology and creative life. In his later writings these opposites lie down together peacefully in the green pastures of Creative Evolution, but in The Doctor's Dilemma (1906) the two tendencies almost tear each other, and the play, apart. With all his romantic soul, Shaw longed to write a tragedy of the one and the many, of the creator-criminal murdered by the power of positive thinking and collective morality. With all his ironic intelligence, he knew what fun he could have with a satiric vivisection of the medical profession. Unhappily, he decided to do the two plays in one. The unexpected result: the comedy makes the tragedy seem pretentious and high-flown, and the tragedy makes the comedy seem at times no better than common bladder farce. Besides, after 52 years on the boards, the situation and some of the characters are getting rickety.

Nonetheless, this modest, seldom brilliant, sometimes even repulsively cute film version of the play, made in England by Anthony (The Browning Version) Asquith, is a pertly entertaining piece of photographed theater. With the bland commercial irreverence that Shaw admired in himself but loathed in his producers, Director Asquith has cast Shaw's pearls of wit among some of the biggest camera hogs in the business. Robert Morley and Alastair Sim bear small resemblance to the characters Shaw had in mind, but in company with John Robinson and Felix Aylmer they make a ludicrously Aristophanic chorus of sawbones. On the serious side, Director Asquith has had more surprising success. Dirk Bogarde (Doctor in the House, et seq.), best known in the U.S. as a sort of British Robert Wagner, turns in a remarkably subtle and mature performance as the heroic villain. As for the heroine, any competent judge of film flesh might confidently have ranked Leslie (Gigi) Caron a little lower than Jayne Mansfield on any list of Girls Least Likely to Succeed as a Shavian Heroine. But as Mrs. Dubedat, an intellectual's woman in whom Shaw himself saw little more than charm, Actress Caron suggests that her personal and momentary charm is really the mysterious recollection of le charme eternel.

Some Came Running (M-G-M), James (From Here to Eternity) Jones's best-selling second novel (TIME, Jan. 13, 1958), was a 1,266-page description of almost continuous sexual activity, climaxed with frequent and flagrant violations of the English language. But the book at least had the distinction of being the biggest (2 lbs. 11 oz.) literary clinker of the year. The film, perhaps because it has necessarily been sterilized by the censor, is not nearly so successful. In the last twelve months there have been at least two major movies (The Vikings and A Farewell to Arms) that were even more absurdly awful.

As a matter of fact, for the first reel or two, the ludicrous unreality of the film is a considerable advantage. The moviegoer is driven to wonder how a movie could possibly be that funny unless it was intended as a satire on what the scriptwriter assumes to be the unconscious assumptions of the moviegoing public, e.g., small towns are places in which respected people lead secret lives of shocking depravity, rich men are usually stuffed shirts, a man who cannot hold his liquor is less than a man, the boss usually sleeps with his secretary, teachers are frigid, prostitutes have hearts of gold, bars are interesting places, there is honor among thieves, culture is for the birds, Hemingway and Faulkner are the greatest writers who ever lived.

Yet as bromide follows bromide, the spectator slowly comes to a drugged realization that the script is not making fun of anybody's beliefs, but simply stating its own. After that, there is nothing to hang around for except occasional flickers of brilliant overacting by Shirley MacLaine, the chance to watch Frank Sinatra play Frank Sinatra, and the spectacle of Director Vincente Minnelli's talents dissolving in the general mess of the story, like sunlight in a slag heap.

Rally Round the Flag, Boys! (20th Century-Fox), Max Shulman's comic novel about contemporary Connecticulture, provided thousands of Shulmaniacs with some of the bigger sniggers of 1957. Shulman's writing bubbled like an aging chorus girl. Director Leo (Going My Way) McCarey's picture fizzes like an overheated bottle of pop. But chances are the customers who nuzzled the one will guzzle the other.

Putnam's Landing, the center of disturbance in this minor mirthquake, is a charming little Connecticut town full of $40,000 "mortgage-covered cottages." The hero (Paul Newman), a Manhattan pressagent, staggers home every night in mortal need of love and kisses. And what does he get? He gets the television stare from his two young sons, and the small hello from a wife (Joanne Woodward) who spends more time on committees ("Garbagedisposalwise, new horizons are daily being opened to us") than she does in the sack. And what does he do about it? Nothing the censor could object to, but enough to make the little woman think that he is up to no good with the local Circe (Joan Collins). At this juncture the Army (Jack Carson) arrives in Putnam's Landing, and the film unwisely abandons a rather promising triangle in favor of a much too improbable Pentagon.

Still, there are moments. The script provides at least one memorable line. "Improper?" the Circe murmurs with a shrug when the hero tries to preserve his virtue. "But why? We're both married." Newman sustains a couple of first-rate scenes of slapstick seduction, and Collins is a comic siren with plenty of oogah. And then there is one superb bit of business which Director McCarey had the fine Irish wit to throw away. In the midst of a furious family argument, Actor Newman stomps into the kitchen, grabs a tea bag, slaps it in a mug and, without for an instant interrupting his tirade, rams the mug under the hot-water spigot to make himself what is probably history's most hopelessly masculine cup of tea.

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