The New Pictures

Prince Valiant (20th Century-Fox). In this movie version of Harold Foster's comic strip, Producer Robert L. Jacks and Director Henry Hathaway have not only matched the museum-copied look of the well-known Sunday viking and his cohorts; they have caught the panel's inner mood of stilted boyhood reverie as well. The outer semblance was attained partly by chance--the CinemaScope screen coincides roughly with the dimensions Foster favors for his cautiously grand panoramas.

For nine weeks Fox cameramen toured Britain, shooting Technicolor background footage of the island's vistas and keeps--Caernarvon, Warwick, Braemar, Eilean Donan and Alnwick (which in the picture serves for Arthur's Camelot). The Scottish village of Dornie, used for a viking stronghold, was mostly rebuilt on the Fox lot for the big siege scene.

The actors, too, were chosen for their resemblance to the comic-strip characters. Robert Wagner, in a pageboy wig and leather buskins, is Prince Val stepping off the page. Janet Leigh, in a palomino peruke, makes a pretty Aleta, James Mason a swart and athletic villain. A couple of vikings, Victor McLaglen and former Heavyweight Champ Primo Camera, with their grunting and spluttering through chin-wigs, give a show that can only be matched by the Wednesday-night wrestling on television.

The plot of the picture is a rapid rundown of Val's early adventures. A viking prince whose throne has been usurped, Val comes to Camelot to ask for a seat at the Table Round. Refused, he becomes a squire to Sir Gawain (Sterling Hay den), falls in love with the Princess Aleta of Ord, is captured by his viking foe, escapes, leads a charge on the enemy citadel, foils a plot to betray King Arthur, kills the villain with his "Singing Sword," and wins his lady fair--all in 100 minutes.

Prince Valiant, in short, is all a small boy could ask for. His parents might as well relax and enjoy the fun too.

Drive a Crooked Road (Columbia). The awkward age for most boys was the golden age for Mickey Rooney. But like most prodigies, one of the most talented child actors of modern times has had to pay for his precocity. At 24, he found himself a has-been--the public would no longer believe that he was a boy and was bored by the suggestion that he was a man. In the last five years, Mickey has made seven pictures, in each of which he seemed less and less the Hardy perennial.

The news of Drive a Crooked Road is in the evidence it gives that Actor Rooney is still a skilled actor. He plays a grease monkey who drives racing cars on the side, a lovelorn little beagle who trots adoringly after the first pretty girl (Dianne Foster) who ever gave him a pat. He finds out too late--sucker's luck --that she has led him into a plot to rob a bank. Mickey drives the getaway car, but discovers at the other end of the crooked road he has taken that the girl he thought it led to has been the property of another man all along.

Like most Hollywood melodramas of the seamy side, Drive a Crooked Road is competently made, i.e., it efficiently machine-stitches the moviegoer's emotions. Rooney plays his fall guy straight down the middle as a decent, unsmart joe who has the usual worries of a man shorter than most of the girls, with the result that he catches the audience's sympathy and holds it even to an improbable end. It is a modest but genuine triumph of self-restrained playing, and suggests that Mickey might well develop from a fine instinctive performer into a keenly conscious and accomplished character actor.

The Siege at Red River (Panoramic; 20th Century-Fox) is a solid wad of batting from Fox's production cushion. Last year, when the studio converted to CinemaScope, it shrewdly maintained a small-screen corporation to fall back on, just in case CinemaScope should prove to be a lumpy bed. It was headed by Leonard Goldstein (TIME. April 28. 1952), who made millions for Universal-International with low-budget pictures like Ma and Pa Kettle and Francis, the talking mule. Now that the wide-screen boom is, in fact, shaking down to competitive normalcy, Goldstein may be worth his weight in gold.

Siege is a reliable old yarn that looks better than usual, chiefly because it has bigger stars. Van Johnson is on a secret mission for the Confederate States, running a Catling gun to Southern sympathizers in the West. Joanne Dru is the Reb-hating daughter of a Union officer. This means, as every moviegoer should know, that they were meant for each other. After Van helps the Yanks chase some Indians away from a Union fort (it's not that he loves Yankees, suh, but there are women and children in there), love triumphs.

The best scene, a violent cavalry battle in a cliff-closed arroyo through which the horses charge with a fine splatter of hooves, is so thrilling that moviegoers will probably not mind its resemblance to a scene in a 1944 Joel McCrea picture, Buffalo Bill.

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