The New Pictures

Hell and High Water (20th Century-Fox) shows what a B picture looks like in CinemaScope. It looks like a big, wide B picture. And worse luck, it is as long (103 min.) as it is broad. The plot: a private philanthropic foundation sends a submarine to the north Pacific to check on reports that an atomic installation has been built there. Richard Widmark commands the sub, Victor Francen is the expedition physicist. His assistant is his daughter (Bella Darvi).

On the way north, Widmark and Bella (in her film debut) give the customers an oozily perverse thrill as they drift, drugged with anoxia, like green, gasping fish through the red haze of the emergency light, and paw each other sweatily on a narrow bunk. What time is not consumed with such amorous dawdling is spent in small brutal excitements--as when, for no particular plot reason, the script has Widmark slash off the professor's thumb. The climax comes with an "atomic explosion," which is colorful and quite loud.

The Final Test (Rank; Continental) is a British joke about that curious British passion, cricket. But it is a very funny joke, all the same. In fact, it's the funniest picture to come out of England since The Captain's Paradise (TIME. Oct. 12). Terence Rattigan's script has a British crackle, Anthony Asquith has directed with a witty flourish, and Robert Morley gives a crunching, slurping, collar-off performance that amounts to a comic orgy.

The final test of the title means, among other things, the last trip to wicket of a great cricket batsman, Sam Palmer (Jack

Warner). On the day of the big game, Sam's son (Ray Jackson), an adolescent would-be poet, faces a crisis. Shall he go see father at the bat, as a loving son should, or take tea with a famous modern poet (Robert Morley), as any budding young writer would want to do?

Actor Morley, looking like a debauched panda, earns most of the laughs as the famous poet who is also a cricket fan. But Morley does not have it all to himself. Jack Warner is a solid but gentle cricketing father. Ray Jackson is sensitive and winning as his son. Adrienne Allen is suitably mild-and-bitter as the boy's housekeeping aunt, and Brenda Bruce is just the kind of barmaid who makes a homely, pleasant place of a London pub.

The Long, Long Trailer (MGM) brings a gifted Hollywood chicken home to roost. Lucille Ball, whom movie people in 1951 declared a has-been, went into television with husband Desi Arnaz and won herself top-rating on TV, an $8,000,000, 2 1/2-year contract with CBS, and a national audience of some 40 million televiewers. Hollywood, of course, asked for another chance.

By a simple enlargement of the safe, sure, average-young-couple formula that has made I Love Lucy TV's No. 1 show for almost two years, M-G-M has produced a wonderfully slap-happy farce. The situation: Lucille and Desi are taking their honeymoon in a trailer. Naturally they run into everything from mortgages to muddy roads to a porte-cochere that might still be standing if it had offered six inches more headroom. The screenplay, by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, feeds Comic Ball just the kind of line she can blab most effectively without altering her Raggedy Ann stare ("Our first rock," she sighs at Desi, reverently clasping a geological specimen he has handed her).

Director Vincente Minnelli (Father of the Bride, An American in Paris), as skilled a comedy hand as Hollywood employs, has a way of letting the story babble on absently between solid banks of common sense until the audience is lulled in smiles. Then all at once the boat is rocking wildly in farcical white water. Item: Actress Ball, wearily trying to climb into bed with the trailer tipped sideways at a 30DEG angle, suddenly loses balance, reels against the outside door, does a back dive into a two-foot-deep puddle of rich brown mud. As she sits there, looking like a beauty-parlor victim whose facial has got out of hand, Desi appears and inquires mildly, "What's the matter, honey, can't you sleep?"

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