The New Pictures

Four In a Jeep (Lazar Wechsler; United Artists), like Swiss Producer Lazar Wechsler's The Last Chance and The Search, is a compassionate study of human rubble left in Europe by World War II. This time the scene is Vienna under its four-power occupation, and the picture's concern is as much with the war's distrustful victors as with its uprooted vanquished. The two are skillfully interwoven in the story of how a four-man M.P. patrol--U.S., Russian, French, British--reacts to the plight of a young Viennese (Viveca Lindfors) whose husband has escaped from a Soviet prisoner-of-war-camp.

The result is a timely, poignant film that cannot be shown in Russia; the Moscow delegates to the Cannes Film Festival in April protested that it was unfriendly to them. Yet it represents the Russian member (Yoseph Yadin) of the jeep patrol as a man no less fundamentally decent than the other three, implies strongly that the West's quarrel is not with the Russian people but with their rulers. Indeed, because the Russian M.P. is the creature of an inflexible system, he feels an inner conflict that makes him the most striking of the four and, in a sense, the most sympathetic.

But the story's hero is the impulsively generous American (Ralph Meeker), who enlists the more cautious Frenchman (Dinan) and Englishman (Michael Medwin) in his efforts to keep troubled Heroine Lindfors and her husband out of the toils of the Soviet authorities. Their unofficial campaign puts the Russian in a tight spot, threatens to upset the precarious working harmony of the four-power command. The story ends with an inconclusiveness more true to life than suitable to drama: the Viennese couple finds sanctuary that seems only temporary; the American reaches a kind of understanding with the Russian that promises to last only until the next time they cross purposes.

Filmed mostly in Vienna's International Zone (during three months when the Russians were not exercising the command), Four in a Jeep strengthens its air of authenticity by having each of its characters speak in his own language, though most of them also speak English. Subtitles in English are seldom needed, sparingly used.

Sweden's Viveca Lindfors gives a performance that puts Hollywood to shame for having wasted her talent in humdrum roles. But none of the well-cast principals can outshine a large group of minor actors playing returning prisoners of war and their families in a long emotional sequence of reunion at a railway station.

M (Columbia) is a remake of the classic German melodrama, originally filmed by Fritz Lang in 1931, which helped bring Director Lang and Actor Peter Lorre to Hollywood. Though the old story of a psychopathic murderer of children has been shifted to a U.S. city in 1951 and altered in some other details--almost always for the worse--the new picture's close imitation of the German version's camera setups and sequence of shots suggests that Director Joseph Losey must have worn out a print of the original in the process of rehearsing himself.

The compulsive killer (David Wayne) is again an immature, outwardly harmless young man who terrorizes a city with his crimes. Under public pressure and political needling, the police clamp down tightly on the city's underworld until its leader (Martin Gabel) decides, for the good of organized crime, to set up his own manhunt. While the police systematically close in on Wayne, an alerted network of criminals from juvenile delinquents to the bigshot's legal mouthpiece (Luther Adler), traces the killer and traps him.

But this time the movie is torn between its attempt to modernize and Americanize the story and its obvious desire to salvage the mood and effects of the Fritz Lang production. The picture also blurs Lang's sharply detailed view of citywide hysteria, fails to preserve his neatly balanced, ironic counterpoint between the simultaneous manhunts of the police and the mobsters. Longtime admirers of the old M will find the new one a badly smudged copy. But for those moviegoers unfamiliar with Lang's film, the story itself--plus an anguished performance by Actor Wayne--should qualify the new picture as a better-than-average thriller.

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