The New Pictures

Double Dynamite (RKO Radio), originally called It's Only Money, got its new title as a leering tribute to the extraordinary physical endowments of Actress Jane Russell. The movie, however, cheats on RKO's full-bosomed advertising. Actress Russell is cast as a demure bank clerk named Mibs Goodhug, who aspires to nothing more glamorous than marriage with Frank Sinatra, the bank teller in the next cage.

On this tame foundation, Scripter Melville Shavelson attempts to build a wild farce involving missing bank funds, a $60,000 horse-race parlay, and a remarkably uninspired police chase. At regular intervals, Groucho Marx appears to give advice to the lovelorn, but his best bits have no relation to the plot and are palely reminiscent of scenes from earlier Marx Brothers movies. Among its other novelties, Double Dynamite does a reverse on standard Hollywood nepotism: it was produced by 3 3 -year-old Irving Cummings Jr., and directed by his 63-year-old father.

Ten Tall Men (Columbia), a tall adventure tale of the French Foreign Legion, treats its old formula so lightheartedly that it becomes the beau jest of the genre. Burt Lancaster, the devil-may-care sergeant, recruits nine rough, tough men from the Legion's brig (Gilbert Roland, Kieron Moore, George Tobias et al.) for a dangerous mission. The regiment is away from the fort; Riff tribes are uniting to attack. Lancaster's outnumbered riffraff must hold off the Riffs until reinforcements arrive.

It turns out to be fairly pleasant work. By abducting the beautiful daughter (Jody Lawrence) of a Riff chieftain on the eve of her reluctant wedding to the head of a rival tribe, the legionnaires disrupt a tribal alliance and stall the attack. Lancaster outfights and outfoxes the Arabs' desperate attempts to recapture the spitfire, while keeping his men's paws off her and taming her into submissive love.

Lancaster & Co. flit in & out of Riff disguises, playing hob with tribal ritual and aplomb. Legionnaire Roland (Bullfighter and the Lady) feints through a free-for-all brawl, performing impromptu veronicas with a cape. A sexy blonde paralyzes the Legion by sashaying into the fort like a burlesque queen heading down the runway. All that is missing--and it seems ready to appear at any moment--is the sight of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in burnooses with a few words to say about the script.

The Tanks Are Coming (Warner) should make moviegoers long for the days when Hollywood shrank from making war films. Since 1949's Battleground broke the box-office jinx, the studios have bombarded audiences with World War II stories celebrating the infantry and airmen; the Navy's FT boats, submarines, carriers and frogmen; the fighting Coast Guard; the Marines ashore and in the air. Now comes the turn of the armor that spearheaded the U.S. drive through France in the summer of 1944.

At the very tip of the spearhead, cocky, harddriving, but an expert tanker, rides Staff Sergeant Steve Cochran, a Southern mountain boy who speaks as if his mouth were always full of grits and corn pone. The story, makes what it can out of Cochran's constant friction with his men, who are predictably slow to recognize his true worth.

Like most of its predecessors, The Tanks would have it appear that the branch of the service which concerns it, and its hero in particular, did the fighting that really won the war. At the climax, Tanker Cochran almost singlehanded drives a wedge through the Siegfried Line, which appears to be an area no deeper than the width of Sunset Boulevard. Amid such juvenile heroics, only the tanks look real, and they expend ammunition with an abandon which should horrify U.S. taxpayers and delight the shoot-'em-up enthusiasts for whom this low-caliber movie was tooled.

Golden Girl (20th Century-Fox) is a corny musical pseudobiography of Lotta Crabtree, whose 19th Century theatrical career carried her from California mining camps to Broadway. Getting almost as much mileage out of his script, Producer George Jessel sets the story during the Civil War, rigs up a fictitious romance between Lotta (Mitzi Gaynor) and a dashing Southern spy (Dale Robertson), trots out a series of old-fashioned vaudeville turns, plays for tears, waves the flag (both Union and Confederate) and endlessly plugs such oldtime numbers as Oh, Dem Golden Slippers.

Treading lightly at first, the film soon begins taking itself as solemnly as Gone With the Wind, and seems to last almost as long. For a couple of reels Lotta yearns for the stage before Producer Jessel lets her go on; then he takes her on a tour that dawdles like an actor poring over his scrapbook. Her suitor follows on horseback. First she thinks he is a gambler, then a bandit, before he emerges proudly as a Southern patriot.

Jessel hits his last sequence like a drummer going into a sock chorus. Lotta is in mid-performance in a big New York theater. A letter arrives, seeming to seal the death of her lover in a Southern hospital. Suddenly her father (Hoofer James Barton) rushes in to announce that the war is over. Tearfully, Lotta goes to the center of stage and sings a mournful chorus of Dixie to the outrage of the audience. Her partner (Dennis Day) steps out of the wings, gives the New Yorkers a lecture that echoes Lincoln's "malice toward none," and soon the audience is on its feet, bawling Dixie with Lotta. Like most Jessel moneymakers, Golden Girl, in the jargon of the show business he knows so well, is strictly from Dixie.

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