The New Pictures

Rawhide (20th Century-Fox). Four badmen, escaped from jail, seize an isolated stagecoach station and wait for the big gold shipment to come through. They kill the stationmaster, grab his assistant (Tyrone Power) as a foil, and hold a stranded traveler (Susan Hayward) and a toddler as hostages in the belief that they are Power's wife & child.

Will Power be able to get to the pistol that he knows is lying behind the horse trough? Can he smuggle a note to the unsuspecting drivers of a stagecoach that stops briefly for a meal and a change of horses? Will Hostage Hayward lose her virtue to the leering villain (Jack Elam) who keeps a lecher's eye on her?

These cliffhanging questions, and many more like them, are designed to stretch the situation's rudimentary suspense to the limit. Scripter Dudley Nichols and Director Henry Hathaway misjudge the breaking point. Their intentions quickly grow too transparent, their maneuverings too forced and artificial. In spite of good, sun-baked photography and effective performances by Actress Hayward and Dean Jagger, as a muttering horse thief, Rawhide also suffers because the ringleader of its heavies is played by Hugh Marlowe in the correct, mellifluous accents of a good radio announcer.

Bird of Paradise (20th Century-Fox] splurges Technicolor, lush Hawaiian scenery and anthropological detail on the job of salvaging a 1912 play (and 1932 movie) about ill-starred love in Polynesia. The result is eye-filling and sometimes interesting. But quaint Hollywood customs get in the way of the South Seas folklore.

A rich young Frenchman (Louis Jourdan), fed up with Western civilization, accompanies a college friend, Polynesian Jeff Chandler, to his exotic island home. The kahuna (medicine man) puts a curse on him. A white derelict (Everett Sloane), banished to an outlying island for committing aboriginal sin, warns him that the native paradise can be hell. But Jourdan goes native, wins the friendship of the chief, Chandler's father, and the hand of the chief's daughter (Debra Paget).

Then, as it must in all sarong epics, catastrophe intrudes on the idyl. The island volcano (realistically played by Hawaii's erupting Mauna Loa) sends fiery lava streaming into the valley, and Jourdan's bride gets her orders from the kahuna to appease the gods by leaping into the angry crater.

Writer-Director Delmer Daves, who pleaded the cause of the American Apache in Broken Arrow, treats the Polynesians with the same respect. He rigs the story with their courtship and marriage customs, their rituals, superstitions, taboos. A preface labels these details as authentic, and most of them look it. The picture's anthropological approach is thus novel and sophisticated. Unfortunately, the dramatic uses to which this research has been put frequently seem as conventional and naive as the old Dorothy Lamour adventures on enchanted Pacific isles. What saps the movie's authenticity even more, and drains its big scenes of any emotional force, is Debra Paget. Her playing of the native girl never resembles anything but a cute trick in a bathing beauty contest at Hollywood High.

Three Guys Named Mike (MGM) all want to marry Airline Stewardess Jane Wyman. Considering how her unflagging winsomeness helps keep this lightweight comedy aloft, no one can blame them. Will she accept the adventurous pilot (Howard Keel), the quiet research chemist (Van Johnson) or the dynamic advertising executive (Barry Sullivan)?

Jane plays a small-town girl, brimming with ideas, who has a charming knack for getting into and out of trouble. Before she answers the crucial question, the picture takes a long ride and not an altogether smooth one. It enrolls her in an airline's training course, carries her through stewardess instruction into her trials & errors as a tyro on the job. As the Mikes in her life turn up, the script offers three versions of boy-meets-girl, gives each suitor a chance to show his wares and make his pitch.

The thin idea is spread pretty thin. But Actress Wyman, well-supported by her leading men and occasionally sprightly dialogue, buoys Three Guys into good-humored entertainment.

Under the Gun (Universal). Buried in this routine thriller is a good documentary sequence. Big-shot Gangster Richard Conte, vacationing in Miami, picks up eye-filling Audrey Totter to amuse him on his way north. During an overnight stop in Georgia he gets into a shooting scrape, is sentenced to 20 years for murder on Audrey's testimony. In the prison camp, Conte soon discovers that the way to get out is to become a gun-toting trusty, shoot down an escaping prisoner, thus win a pardon.

With this scheme in mind, he offers Convict Sam Jaffe $25,000 to make a break. If Conte kills him, the money will go to Jaffa's family; if Conte misses, Jaffe gets both the money and freedom. Director Ted Tetzlaff keeps the duel poised tensely against an authentic-looking background. But in the end, Under the Gun reverts to type with a foolish chase through a cypress swamp.

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