The New Pictures

Wicked Woman (Greene-Rouse; United Artists) is a reeking little slice of life from the butt end of that infinite salami. A tawdry blonde named Billie Nash (Beverly Michaels) is dumped off a bus, bag & baggage, somewhere in Southern California. Next day she wriggles her way into a job wrestling tables in a local bar. A few days later she is wrestling with the boss (Richard Egan). Between holds, she persuades him to sell the bar from under his wife's nose and run away with her to Mexico. Since the wife's nose is usually stuck in a whisky glass, the getaway is not difficult; but before the lovers are done. Destiny slips an ironic Mickey into Billie's beer.

Actress Michaels handles the title role in this inexpensive picture with vulgar assurance. Actor Egan is almost her tough match. The minor parts, especially the barkeep's wife (Evelyn Scott) and a lecherous pants-presser (Percy Helton), are also well attended to. Producer Clarence Greene and Director Russell Rouse, who also collaborated on a competent script, deserve high credit. Having decided to serve cheap whisky, they had the wit and the courage to serve it straight.

The Golden Coach (Panaria Films; I.F.E.), made by Jean Renoir, a son of the famed French painter, is that rare product from the film industry, a work of rich, individual temperament. As he made clear in Grand Illusion (1938) and The River (1951), Director Renoir is often too full of beautiful things he wants to say to pay a decent respect to how he says them. Bad scenes stand out glaringly against the fine features of his films. The story sometimes has to snore in the parlor while Renoir fondly lingers to adjust an esthetic or intellectual spit curl. All the same, his pulsing joy in all he feels and sees sweeps through his pictures.

The Golden Coach is the story of what happens when a band of strolling players of the Renaissance, a commedia dell' arte company from Italy, troops into a Spanish colonial seat in South America to play for the uncomprehending rurals and the hayseed nobility of the region. Camilla, the Columbine (Anna Magnani), in love with a young Castilian noble she met on the voyage over (Paul Campbell), is soon juggling the local bullfighter (Riccardo

Rioli) and the Spanish viceroy himself (Duncan Lamont).

Too proud to fight the competition, the first lover runs off to fight the Indians.

The viceroy then makes his move: he makes Camilla a present of his golden coach of state. His council protests. At their threat to depose him, the viceroy yields. But Camilla gives them all the sharp edge of her tongue, whirls away in the coach before anybody can stop her, and yields herself to the athletic embraces of the matador.

Enter the other two lovers. All three make a passionate plea for her devotion.

All three convince her. All three are sent away. Camilla is through with men? One never knows. Her next visit is to the bish op, all-powerful in the colony. To him she presents the coach of state. The crisis is averted. "Camilla," the bishop announces, "will sing at High Mass." The End.

The scenario, freely adapted from a short play by Prosper Merimee, is just the sort Renoir likes -- a nice, loose-fitting smock, with plenty of frayed places for inspiration to stitch up at leisure. In The Golden Coach, as in The River, he has stitched (with the help of his nephew Claude Renoir, who supervised the photography in both pictures) a Joseph's coat of heart-catching colors. The colors weave and flow in a rhythm that carries one image vigorously into the next. The flow is swept along, too, by the apt and fetching musical score of Antonio Vivaldi, Italian master of the age in which the scene is set. The lively songs of the mounte banks are cribbed from some old com media dell' arte notes, except for a pert little tarantella by Musical Director Gino Marinuzzi. Color and sound -- and indeed most of the elements of the film -- are matched and inbraided with loving care.

The acting is not uniformly topnotch, perhaps because the film, though made in Italy, is spoken mostly in English, a language some of the actors are not very familiar with. But whatever the rest of the cast may lack is more than made up by Anna Magnani. Not since she emerged in Open City, as a sort of back-alley Duse, has Magnani pelted an audience with so much juicy histrionic fruit. She raves, she twitters, she hauls off and slugs. In one astonishing scene, a whole bullfight transpires in her face far more impressively than it could have been shown in a ring.

To hear her grunt an Italian monosyllable --"Eh!"--is better than a week in Bologna. And when she laughs, she seems to laugh out of every pore at once, as if it were just a more enjoyable way of sweating. In fact, Magnani is almost too strong for Renoir to hold. At every move she takes the stage from his main theme, a Pirandellian play on appearance and reality, theater and life; and it is just as well for the picture that she does.

The Command (Warner) proves that the new CinemaScope technique has added to the old-fashioned western no more than a few extra Indians to fill out the wide open spaces on the screen. The blue-coats are as usual trying to get a wagon train past the redskins, and as usual they do, but only after the routine game of ring-around-a-rosy, with many an Indian biting the dust. The action is somewhat confused in this one by a chicken-pox epidemic that serves little purpose except to permit the audience and the hero (Guy Madison) to peek down the blouse of the heroine (Joan Weldon) while she is being vaccinated. The WarnerColor is pretty, too, and in stereophonic sound, the arrows seem to zip alarmingly right past the moviegoer's ear and plunge into the screen.

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