The New Pictures

Dial M for Murder (Warner) started out in 1952 as a British television drama, moved on to long, successful runs on the London stage and Broadway, and has now been made into a first-rate movie. Director Alfred Hitchcock, by shooting the film in three-dimensional WarnerColor, avoids the static quality common to many stage plays when transferred to the screen. The 3-D is used not so much for its shock value as to bring alive for moviegoers much of the theater's intimacy and depth of movement.

Dial M is starred with fine scenes and good performances. Though played as contemporary melodrama, it somehow manages to reflect the gaslight magic of turn-of-the-century London. Murder is the plot, but everyone is extremely gentlemanly about the crime, from the Holmesian police inspector (John Williams) down to the caddish assassin (Anthony Dawson). The crime is conceived by quick-witted Ray Milland, who, losing his wife's love, decides to murder her for her money rather than wait for her to leave him. A solicitous sort who doesn't want to hurt anyone unnecessarily, Milland arranges to spend the night of the murder on the town with his wife's lover (Robert Cummings) as his alibi. For his murder weapon, he selects an old college acquaintance who is amoral as an alley cat. The scene in which Milland bends Actor Dawson to his will is a theatrical delight.

As the intended victim, Grace Kelly is not required to do much more than look beautiful and vulnerable, and she accomplishes both with patrician distinction. The fun of Dial M lies in its duel of wits, and audiences may relish seeing Milland mowed down by superior intelligence rather than by a sawed-off shotgun.

At 25, blue-eyed Grace Kelly is known around Hollywood as a rich girl who made good. She was born in Philadelphia, where her father, John B. Kelly, turned a $7,000 loan in 1919 into a bustling $18 million construction business.* After she finished high school, Grace headed straight for New York, where she studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. She worked first as a photographer's model, then slowly began to get parts in television, summer stock and, finally, one or two Broadway shows.

A bit part in a movie (Fourteen Hours--TIME, March 12, 1951) got Grace her first big Hollywood role--Gary Cooper's wife in High Noon. After that success, M-G-M signed her to a seven-year contract.

Since her first Metro picture (Mogam-bo), Grace has been busier than a flock of starlets at a cocktail party. Warner Bros, borrowed her for Dial M, and Paramount for three more films, which have not yet been released. All are surefire hits, too: Country Girl (with William Holden and Bing Crosby), Rear Window (with James Stewart), Bridges at Toko-Ri (with Holden). She is now working on Green Fire (with Stewart Granger) for MGM; this summer she returns to Paramount for Catch a Thief (with Cary Grant), follows that with The Cobweb for MGM.

What brought on the rush for Kelly? Says Director Alfred Hitchcock, who worked with Grace in Dial M and Rear Window: "She is that rare thing in movies, a lady. She is a real actress. Not in the histrionic sense, but in a deeper sense. She's one of those people who fit into any leading-lady part. She has a youthful appearance photographically, but she is no child or juvenile in any sense. Ingrid Bergman has the same quality. It suggests intelligence."

Grace herself is the least articulate person on the subject of Grace Kelly. To newcomers she presents a fine if forbidding figure of a coolly aloof craftsman who saves herself for the cameras. "This is a time," she says, "when the movies are not looking for contract actresses, but for the right girl for the right part." A lot of Hollywood studios these days seem to believe that the right girl is Kelly.

Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (Dancigers & Ehrlich; United Artists), filmed in Mexico and directed by Spain's expatriate Luis (The Yowng and the Damned) Bunuel, is played to the hilt by Ireland's former Abbey Player Dan O'Herlihy. It will carry many a moviegoer back to the long afternoons of childhood when he pored over the pages of Daniel Defoe's classic.

Here, again, the storm-tossed mariner comes staggering through the surf to begin his 28 years of bitter exile on a desert island. At first, Crusoe rejoices in survival itself, then in the happy rescue of guns and supplies from his ship, wrecked on a nearby reef. With the ship's dog and cat, with a home abuilding and goats to tend, the castaway seems secure in his growing self-sufficiency. But fever comes, and he is finally racked by the even greater terrors of loneliness. Director Bunuel and Actor O'Herlihy are particularly fine in picturing the despair of a man alone. The suggestion of it comes in O'Herlihy's bemused fingering of the women's clothes that he has salvaged from the wreck; the note deepens with the death and burial of his companion, the dog; it breaks into wild orchestration as the crazed man runs to an echoing valley and there hurls the 23rd Psalm against the ringing hills solely to hear the answering sound of his own distorted voice. In a drunken revel, O'Herlihy re-creates in his cave all the roistering cheerfulness of an Elizabethan pub, but this ends, too, in a disillusion so great that he walks blindly into the surf, bearing aloft a blazing torch. When he drops the brand into the sea, it is as though his own humanity were extinguished.

This slow (but not too slow) movement shapes the first part of the film and prepares the fevered pace of the second, with its prancing cannibals, the gibbering man Friday, and the swashbuckling English crew who at last return Crusoe to the world of men. Actor O'Herlihy plays with a steady brilliance. His joy at finding Friday (James Fernandez) turns quickly into a sort of lordly Colonel Blimpism as he sets their relationship as that of master and servant. Then his performance be- comes electrically charged with fear when he suspects Friday may murder him in his sleep and eat him. The savage and the civilized man have a long and uneasy road before they reach the haven of friendship. Like Defoe's original work, the movie is a neat mixture of moralizing and adventure, but, fortunately, the moralizing is never pompous or the adventuring ever dull.

Flame and the Flesh (MGM) works hard at making Lana Turner into a Hollywood version of a realistic Italian actress.

Like Anna Magnani, Lana screeches in anger and scratches herself; like Silvana Mangano. she slouches about in her slip and sprawls on a bed swatting flies; like Gina Lollobrigida, she has all the males in sight panting at her heels.

But just as Lana, turned brunette for the occasion, is synthetic Italian, so is the movie. Filmed in Naples, it deals with such elemental matters as poverty, sex and jealousy, but Flame is no more earthy than a surburban child patting mud pies. The plot has Lana, down to her last lira, befriended by a true-blue simpleton (Bonar Colleano), who promptly falls in love with her. Moving into his apartment, Lana falls in love, instead, with his roommate. Singer Carlos Thompson, who looks remarkably like TV's Ventriloquist Paul Winchell and acts with all the intensity of one of Winchell's puppets. Pier Angeli. Thompson's fiancee, is on hand to look bereft and beautiful, while such outlanders as Charles Goldner, Peter Illing and Eric Pohlman do their best to behave like Neapolitans.

After exchanging Vesuvian clinches and cliches, Lana and Carlos elope without benefit of clergy, and the camera trails dutifully after them, pausing only for Technicolored glances at such tourist resorts as Positano and Amalfi. At long last, Lana's heart of gold rings true: she nobly sends her lover back to his roommate and his hand-wringing bride-to-be. Then, in the unmistakably Italo-American manner of Jimmy Durante, Lana walks off alone into the night, her head held high and going--as the synopsis puts it--"who knows where?"

* Father Kelly, also an expert oarsman, won the Olympic singles in Antwerp in 1920; son John, a champion like his father, took first prize twice (in 1947 and 1949) in the famed Diamond Sculls at Henley, England.

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