The New Pictures

The Strange Door (Universal-International), remotely based on Robert Louis Stevenson's short story, The Sire de Maletroit's Door, is a creaky costume melodrama that lets Charles Laughton wallow in villainy up to his ample jowls. The film itself is puerile stuff. But Actor Laughton, who slices his ham with stylish zest, makes it fun to watch whenever he looms into sight.

The story takes place in an 18th Century chateau, where even the secret panels have secret panels, where Boris Karloff keeps the keys to the dungeons, and evil servants slink about among torture contraptions apparently devised by some medieval Rube Goldberg. Lording it over this den of vipers, slobbering over great platters of mutton, and fondling his foul schemes, sits Seigneur Laughton.

To satisfy a grudge against his brother, who has already spent 20 years in the chateau's deepest dungeons, Laughton plans to force the brother's daughter (Sally Forrest) into marriage with a hand-picked blackguard (Richard Stapley) whom he has tricked into captivity. He introduces the couple ceremoniously, and when they begin to bicker, he gloats: "They've begun by disliking each other. Hatred will come later."

But young Stapley turns out to be no blackguard after all. He is really a black-sheep nobleman, willing to mend his ways for love of Sally. He tells Laughton triumphantly that the scheme has failed and "there's nothing you can do about it." Patiently, as to a child, hitting each word with malevolent emphasis, Laughton drawls: "How wrong you are." As long as a piece of fiendishness remains to be done, and one that demands lip-quivering, eye-rolling relish, never underestimate the power of Actor Laughton.

The Barefoot Mailman (Columbia) is a horse opera without horses. It takes place not in the West but on the Florida frontier of 1890, when the U.S. mail traveled between primitive Miami and Palm Beach on bare but intrepid feet. The menace comes from a marauding band of beachcombers, who would as gladly rob the postal service as kidnap the ingenue or shoot up the village of Miami. In bright new SupercineColor,* they accomplish all three.

But Beachcomber John Russell and his mangy crew reckon without the courage of Mailman Jerome Courtland, the awshucks hero who plunges under water to wrestle alligators hand-to-jaw when the safety of Heroine Terry Moore is at stake. And they fail to figure on the cunning of Dude Robert Cummings, a polysyllabic confidence man who comes from the North to swindle the Floridians, and stays on to save them. Whenever Cummings is in a tight spot, he reaches to his watch chain for a pistol the size of a tie-clip and plugs his assailant with a Lilliputian slug.

The movie's ammunition is no heavier than Actor Cummings' bullets. Except for Cummings, who obviously can't take these goings-on seriously, and Character Actor Will Geer, playing a sly local crook, the cast is as earnest as any posse that ever hit the trail. Watching them gallop horselessly through jungle thickets to make Miami safe for Sophie Tucker is one way of waiting for the top half of the double bill.

* A three-color process which, while not quite the match of Technicolor, is simpler and less expensive to use, requiring no special camera, and only a single strip of film in shooting. SupercineColor is expected to brighten 25 pictures during 1952.

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