The New Pictures

Strictly Dishonorable (MGM) shows how persistent Hollywood can be. The picture is the second movie version of Preston Sturges' 1929 Broadway hit; it is also MGM's second attempt to capture Ezio (South Pacific) Pinza's middle-aged sex appeal on film.*

This adaptation does tolerably well by Actor Pinza but it makes hash of Playwright Sturges' comedy. The original play told a simple, incongruously funny story about a young and fairly innocent Southern girl who tries to seduce a rakish Italian opera star; he turns out to be such a sentimentalist that he marries her. The film all but smothers the idea with plot complications, cooking up elaborate reasons for the marriage--in name only--to come first, so that the pair can pursue their dalliance and yet stay strictly honorable under the technical rules of the cinema code. Irrelevantly, one of the film's best moments comes in a movie-house sequence showing glimpses of Greta Garbo in long's A Woman of Affairs.

Janet Leigh is engaging as the Southern belle who takes up with a courtly rake in a Manhattan speakeasy. Actor Pinza, 59, whose close-up profile occasionally resembles Douglas Mac Arthur's, carries off his role with vigorous charm, and takes full advantage of his cues for a few operatic bits (the best: Song of the Golden Calf, from Faust), and two old popular tunes (I'll See You in My Dreams, Everything I Have Is Yours). If his style is a shade heavy for deft comedy, it is certainly no heavier than the script.

Take Care of My Little Girl (20th Century-Fox), based on Peggy Goodin's 1950 novel, tilts at the evils of the U.S. college sorority system. Even before the film was made, het-up sorority sisters blasted it like fruit growers protesting The Grapes of Wrath. Most moviegoers are likely to find it a fair enough indictment of the abuses of Greek-letter societies. They are less likely to get as worked up over the problem as the picture does.

At length and in Technicolor, the film shows that sororities have their points, e.g., a cozy sense of belonging, but none to offset the hurt they inflict on the girls they turn down, or to justify the snobbish values they set up. It pictures the societies through the bright eyes of Freshman Jeanne Grain, who comes to a Midwestern university all atwitter to join Upsilon Upsilon Upsilon.

As a pledge, Jeanne has just what the sorority wants: good looks, clothes, social poise, a well-to-do father, and a mother who was a Tri U herself and has never forgotten it. In the end, Jeanne, after seeing how Tri U snubs "social inferiors," is disenchanted enough to turn in her pledge pin and rush to the arms of a worthy young fellow (Dale Robertson) who, far from belonging to a fraternity, does not even own a tuxedo.

The treatment of Tri U's tribal customs and cruelties is competent, though overdrawn. It gives the sisters a hard time, while taking too tolerant a view of the system's true culprits: the parents who let them grow up that way.

The Prince Who Was a Thief (Universal-International) is the kind of frothy, nonalcoholic, Arabian-nights cocktail that Hollywood has shaken up a thousand and one times. Brusque handclaps still bring on the harem dancing girls; Tangier bristles with flashing scimitars, wicked potentates, skulking cutpurses, rococo palaces and phrases.

Through it all, leaping, swimming, scaling walls and trailing broken hearts,"flashes "Desired of Damsels" Tony Curtis, born to the purple but kidnaped and reared as a thief. With the help of an impish girl thief (Piper Laurie), who can wriggle through the treasury's barred window, Tony outfoxes and outfights the usurper to win back his rightful place.

The movie is energetically played, well-paced by Director Rudolph Mate, occasionally touched with humor and quite free of pretensions. It should delight youngsters without irritating the grownups who go along for the air conditioning.

* The first attempt: Mr. Imperium, which has been put into cold storage in the hope that the new film will get Pinza off to a better start.

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