The New Pictures

But Not for Me (Perlberg-Seafon; Paramount) is a new version of a slight Samson Raphaelson comedy (Accent on Youth) which first appeared on Broadway in 1934, and soon thereafter on the screen. Hollywood has packed a prize cast into the remodeled hull, but the craft is still so frail that only the acting mastery of Lee J. Cobb and Lilli Palmer saves it from capsizing.

Then too there is Clark Gable. No director has ever been presumptuous enough to ask "The King" to act, but his presence alone gives any film the atmosphere of Hollywood's glorious pre-Method past. Gable's voice may croak a little, but he still has the confidence of a man who knows that so long as he goes on playing The King no one will dare play The Ace.

But Not for Me casts him as a theatrical producer, a sort of oaken image of Mike Todd. He has two phones in his car, spends an annual $785 in the barbershop and has an ex-wife (Lilli Palmer) who hovers about to protect her alimony, always remembering the anniversary of their divorce; she once gave him a hot-water bottle that snored. At 56, age is closing in. He wears a wrist alarm clock; when it goes off, it is time to take his pills.

The producer's next play, about a middle-aged man who falls in love with a young girl, is headed nowhere. Realizing that he is a has-been, Gable decides to quit Broadway, fires his 22-year-old secretary (Carroll Baker). She turns on him and snarls: "I love you. I hope you rot for spoiling love for me with other men. You did a terrible thing to me. You opened my eyes and heart and never touched me.'' So he touches her. There, by golly, is the twist he needs. The young girl in his play should be the aggressor.

He runs to the alcoholic playwright (Lee Cobb), urges him to start rewriting, assaults him with such rancid boffolas as: "Your cough is the illegitimate child of you and those cigarettes." They redo the play in four weeks; the secretary is cast in the female lead, the play is a smash, the girl proposes to Gable in Sardi's.

In the end, Gable comes to his senses and returns to his former wife, but she has been there all along: bright, funny, trim, feminine, mature, refined Lilli Palmer. If there is a man in the audience over twelve years of age who would not have preferred her from the start, he could only be the man who would be King.

Sapphire (Rank; Universal-International) is a semiprecious British attempt to admix a sociological problem drama with a flat-out murder mystery. The jewel of the title is a beautiful, auburn-haired girl; as the film begins, she is found lying face up on the hard ground of Hampstead Heath with six knife wounds around her heart.

Scotland Yard's Superintendent Hazard (Nigel Patrick) is on the trail at once. Sapphire was a student at the Royal Academy of Music and the fiancee of a pallid architecture student (Paul Massie), who has just won a scholarship for study in Italy. When autopsy shows that she was three months pregnant, the murder motive seems clear: the young architect's scholarship makes no provision for wife or baby; he and his ambitious family would not stop short of murder to see to it that they had a Wren rather than a turkey in the oven.

Then Sapphire's brother (Earl Cameron), a physician from Warwickshire, steps into the detective's office wearing the resigned half-smile of the perennial underdog. His skin is as dark as Sapphire's was fair. "Our mother was black; our father was white," he explains. "You never know how it's going to go."

The investigation widens, enters the caves of Negro London, from the lichenous flat of Tribal Chieftain Horace Big Cigar to Tulip's, a jazz club where a superbly directed, superbly erotic dance explores the universal rhythm of the Negro race. Whom did Sapphire know before she crossed the color line? One Negro girl is ready to tell, says: "I hated that high-yellow doll"; Sapphire had stolen her man. The police find him, a Negro bishop's son with a Mayfair manner and an Oxford accent. Had the bishop's boy ever intended marriage with Sapphire? Good heavens, no. "She was part white."

Aggrieved as they might have been, her old friends would hardly have murdered her. One of Sapphire's earlier landladies more accurately suggests the killer's motive, asks: "Would you be pleased with a brass sovereign?"

As the Yard moves closer to the killer, the script unfortunately moves closer to propaganda, repeats its brothers-under-the-skin theme so often that the point is blunted. Sapphire is a novel mystery that pulls no punches, but it would have been even better if it had not started swinging with the left.

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