The New Pictures

The Second Woman (Harry Popkin; United Artists) improves on the old Hollywood custom of modeling a movie after a hit. The picture apes not one model but at least three. Its title trades on The Third Man, while most of its twists come straight out of Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca and Spellbound.

Moody music and the creepy offscreen voice of Heroine Betsy Drake introduce shots of a house's charred ruins in a rugged setting on the California coast. Flashbacks tell the story of its brooding onetime occupant, Architect Robert Young, who has permitted no one inside since the accidental death of his wife (described by another woman as "the most beautiful girl I've ever seen").

Betsy falls in love with Young, but she is disturbed by reminders of his dead wife, and even more by the misfortunes that hound him: his horse is mysteriously crippled, his dog killed, his rosebush poisoned, his favorite painting bleached and, finally, his house burned to a crisp. A kindly doctor warns Betsy that Young is a dangerous paranoiac with a yen for damaging his own property, and even Young urges her to stay away. But she sticks by him right to the psychiatricky finish.

The movie has a well-groomed look and shows admirable taste in the melodramas it chooses to imitate, though it gluttonously borrows more plot than it can digest.

The Company She Keeps (RKO Radio) tests Lizabeth Scott's capacity for self-sacrifice. She is a chic parole officer with full authority over the pretty parolee (Jane Greer) who is beating her time with Dennis O'Keefe. Lizabeth's determined nobility, especially when given a legitimate chance to send Jane back to prison, is something that neither the script nor Actress Scott can make believable. Moviegoers may take some comfort in Actress Greer's able performance as a bitter, man-hungry jailbird with a craving for respectability.

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