The New Pictures

Career (Hal Wallis; Paramount), the film version of James Lee's off-Broadway hit of 1957, tells the story of a stage-struck ex-soldier (Anthony Franciosa) from Lansing, Mich, who heads for Manhattan after World War II to become an actor. He imagines himself going from hit to hit, but unfortunately he staggers from cliche to cliche. For six months he lives in the inevitable cold-water flat with an orange crate for an icebox, and walks the streets from one tryout to another. Nothing doing. Then a talk-big, pay-small type Dean Martin) gives him a good part in a bad play in the usual cellar in Greenwich Village.

The actors outnumber the audience almost every night, but the show must go on. The hero pleads with the big Broadway producer to come down and catch his act, but the brute, who later confesses that he loathes all actors, gives him the brush. Meanwhile the hero's girl comes east, gets a job, persuades him to marry her, gets pregnant, begs him to quit the stage, loses hope and the baby, runs home to mother and gets a divorce. Grimly true to his art, the hero hangs on. And so it goes for an hour and three-quarters, through every possible vicissitude of a Broadway career--from Sorry, You're Not the Type to the Faithless Friend to the Marriage of Ambition to the McCarthy Blacklist to the Job as a Waiter at Sardi's. In the end, naturally, there is the Big Break, the Smash Hit and the Name Up There in Lights.

The script has been knowledgeably written by Playwright Lee, and directed by Joseph (The Matchmaker) Anthony with a sure sense of the theatrical moment. Actor Franciosa gives much the most coherent performance of his film career and he is fairly well supported by Dean Martin and Shirley MacLaine. The main trouble with the picture is the perhaps inevitable one that the characters are so actorish and attitudinous that they come to seem phony, and their problems unreal. They are so passionately and exclusively interested in themselves that the spectator may sensibly conclude that they do not need any interest from him.

Pillow Talk (Arwin; Universal-International) offers more talk than pillows. And just in case the talk should happen to lag, as it often does, the picture also offers something beyond discussion and almost beyond belief: a romantic comedy team composed of Rock Hudson and Doris Day, the box-office champions of the 1958-59 season. The idea was obviously to present a sort of world series of sex, but what happened to the sex? When these two magnificent objects go into a clinch, aglow from the sun lamp and agleam with hair lacquer, they look less like creatures of flesh and blood than a couple of 1960 Cadillacs that just happen to be parked in a suggestive position.

Rock is a songwriting satyr who as somebody remarks, does less scoring on paper than he does in his apartment. He shares a party line with Doris, an overdecorated interior decorator who soon finds herself in something of a sizzle. Rock has so many girls on the string that she can hardly get a call on the line. She complains to the phone company. Rock suavely assures the investigator, a young woman, that "I've never had any complaints before," and proceeds to demonstrate the reason why--to her obvious satisfaction. He then rings up the decorator and accuses her of listening in on his love life because she has none of her own. But not long after that, Rock gets a look at the "sour old maid" he has been scolding. As the camera sneaks up behind the squirming heroine, the hero gasps: "So that's the other end of your party line!" He decides to make a new connection at all costs, and introduces himself as a little old Texas millionaire. And so on, until, of course, the false pretenses end in true love. Moral: the road to paradise is paved with bad intentions.

There are compensations. The picture has been flashily produced in a slather of Eastman Color that often looks like violet shaving cream. It has been smartly directed by Michael (Cyrano de Bergerac) Gordon. And it presents, in the part of Rock's jealous rival, one of the funniest young men in movies today: a sort of Ivy League Dracula named Tony Randall.

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