The New Pictures

Warlock (20th Century-Fox) is a two-hour, $2,000,000 western with three major stars (Richard Widmark, Henry Fonda, Anthony Quinn), two main heroes, two main villains, three main plots, five subplots, eight cooling corpses, and nine major outbreaks of violence. Hero No. 1 (Fonda), a sort of Good Bad Guy, is a notorious gunman who wears gold-handled Colts. The townspeople of Warlock ask him to protect them from Villain No. 1 (Tom Drake), a Bad Bad Guy with a slow sneer, a fast draw, and plenty of sneaking dry-gulchers on his payroll. Unfortunately, Hero No. 1 refuses to take the job without his sidekick. Villain No. 2 (Quinn), a G.B.G. who turns out to be a B.B.G.--the sort of lowdown skunk that makes his girl friend keep him. So the scriptwriter rings in Hero No. 2 (Widmark), a G.B.G. who develops into a G.G.G. and goes after the bad guys like a blackbird picking ticks off a cow. In the end, with the villains all gone, the heroes have nothing left to do but answer the all-important questions: 1) Who is faster on the draw? 2) Who is slower on the drawl?

It Happened to Jane (Arwin; Columbia). "Why,'' asks a small boy, gazing up into the homely face of Ernie Kovacs, "are you so mean?" Smugly lipping his expensive Havana, Kovacs simpers like a contented cigargoyle at one of the nicest things anybody has ever said to "the meanest man in the world." As such, and proud of it, Comic Kovacs turns a fairly unfunny script into a funny farce--the success story of a self-made monster.

Born on the wrong side of the tracks, Ernie is the sort of stop-at-nothing cartoon capitalist who not only moved over to the right side--he also bought the tracks. The camera discovers him, in sleek middle age, roaring it up as the beast of the board room of the Eastern & Portland Railroad, whose cringing miscellany of vice presidents is pleading with the "general," as he likes to be called, not to ruin a poor helpless widow (Doris Day) and her two small children. With surly reluctance, he consents to make a nominal restitution to the "miserable broad" for her shipment of lobsters that died on the siding because of his penny-wise policies.

The broad, with good reason, demands triple damages--and wins them from a local court. But Kovacs only leers happily around his cigar, and his lawyers inform her lawyer (Jack Lemmon): "We have the entire appellate structure of the State of Maine before us." Deciding that two can play dirty pool, the heroine slaps a writ of execution on the villain, "attaches" the next train that happens to come through town, parks it on a spur track and challenges the brute to top that. He does. He demands rent for the spur track -- $1 a foot, $230 a day.

The heroine of course cannot raise that kind of money--but the public can and does. Aroused by the brave little woman's battle with the corporate dragon, millions of televiewers produce a deluge of dimes for a fight-the-villain fund. With Odyssean shrewdness, Kovacs pretends to yield. He makes the heroine a present of the train. Unfortunately, he announces with an evil snicker, that leaves him without a train to serve the town. The horrified townspeople turn against the heroine. Has the villain triumphed? As far as the spectator is concerned, there was never any contest. Who could prefer a conventionally pretty Hollywood Belinda to the most hilarious Rassendale who ever slept in sneer-curlers?

The Mating Game (MGM) is a busy B that crudely tramples among The Darling Buds of May, a riotously ribald novel by Britain's H. E. Bates (TIME, May 26, 1958), and reduces it to a nice, safe, bring-the-whole-family outing in the postcard pastures of Maryland.

The picnic takes place on the go-acre estate of one "Pop" Larkin (Paul Douglas), a beer-bellied, golden-hearted. Godsend-payday paragon of the old-fashioned vices: civic irresponsibility and the right to shirk. Inevitably, the Internal Revenue Service (Tony Randall) tries to catch up with him. "I'd like to look at your books," says tight-lipped Tony, the perfect black-shoe bureaucrat. Douglas looks puzzled. "I don't do much reading," he replies. But Tony forges ahead, deeper and deeper into a slough of Southern hospitality.

Douglas overwhelms him with irrelevant information, tempts him with a scrumptious Maryland crab salad, sends him tooting off on a tour of the farm with an oversexed daughter (Debbie Reynolds) who reclines invitingly in the first patch of tall grass she can find. By the time Tony gets back to the farmhouse, two of Debbie's grade-schoolboy brothers have helpfully removed the engine from his car--they are giving him, they announce, a free "ring job." At about this point, poor Tony is driven to drink (something called a Laughing Hyena: one part vermouth, two parts gin, three parts whisky). After which he of course starts to laugh like a hyena, blacks out, wakes up the next morning in Debbie's bed. "You were wonderful," she sighs adoringly. "You better get some more sleep. After last night you need it." Tony stares at the camera in horror. "What," he asks the audience, "have I done!"

He has done, as usual, a pretty slick job as a straight-face comic, and he would have done a better job--along with Actor Douglas and Actress Reynolds--if Director George Marshall had not decided to play The Mating Game at a speed less suitable to a romantic comedy than to a board of chess.

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