The New Pictures

About Mrs. Leslie (Paramount). Shirley Booth, with her gilded Oscar (Best Actress of 1952, for her work in Come Back, Little Sheba) scarce beginning to peel, has already laid aside her dignity and gone for a summer's dunk in a tub of sentimental lather. For this film, based on a Vina Delmar novel, is pure soap opera, and it is the kind of suds that leaves a sticky ring around the mind. Shirley plays a part that is wallowingly reminiscent of John's Other Wife.

The wonder is how beautifully she plays it. For the first half-hour Actress Booth breathes such a warm belief into the dull things she is doing that the audience willingly suspends the disbelief the silly plot inspires.

Mrs. Leslie, a nice, middle-aged landlady in Beverly Hills, was once in a nightclub act. That was back in the days when her sacroiliac swung free, and one night she met a tired businessman named George Leslie (Robert Ryan). He invited her to go with him to California for a six-week vacation, and she did. She went for a good many years after that, too, and gave him "peace and contentment." Unfortunately, what George likes may seem to most moviegoers like the long, dull evenings at home that movies are supposed to relieve.

Mercifully, at long last, Mr. Leslie dies, leaving his girl friend enough money to buy a house, in which she spends the rest of her days, yacking at her boarders to do what the synopsis calls "striking out in search of contentment, knowledge and peace." In the general emotional drizzle, the scriptwriting provides a few rainbows of humor ("There's one thing about California," says Shirley. "No matter how hot it gets in the daytime, there's nothing to do at night"). And Director Daniel Mann, who also handled Shirley in Come Back, Little Sheba, occasionally makes the best of a bad job. As for Shirley, About Mrs.

Leslie should suggest to her that Hollywood cannot always be trusted to provide the best employment for her remarkable acting talents.

Demetrius and the Gladiators (20th Century-Fox), a sequel to The Robe, is an energetic attempt to fling the mantle of sanctity over several more millions of the entertainment dollar. It offers a number of The Robe's sets, at least two of the same scenes, and three of the same stars --Jay Robinson, who plays the Emperor Caligula with a heavy sneer; Michael Rennie, who portrays Peter as a sort of apostolic Anthony Eden; and Victor Mature, a bulky fellow who helps in filling the huge CinemaScope screen.

The first scene of Demetrius is the last scene of The Robe: the condemned centurion's bride sends the robe to her Christian friends. In trying to hide it, the freed slave Demetrius (Victor Mature) scuffles with a Roman soldier and is sentenced to be trained for the arena in a gladiatorial school.

When Demetrius refuses to kill his opponent, the Emperor substitutes three tigers. But Demetrius tarzans the beasts (obviously tame as tabbies), and a Roman noblewoman named Messalina (Susan Hay ward) decides she would like to do a little wrestling with him herself. In due time Demetrius is thrown, and lands for a brief period in the lady's bed.

The gladiatorial contests are sweaty enough as such things go in the movies.

The closeups of the tigers burn bright with a sensuous beauty, and all the crowd scenes are well handled. Frequently, though, the Biblical dialogue gets out of whack. Sample: Debra Paget, as a Christian girl, holding up the robe: "Oooo! I didn't know Christ was so tall. Was he as tall as you?" Victor Mature, modestly: "Just about." Mr. Mulct's Holiday (G-B-D International) appears to be a contemporary French attempt to make a silent film in sound. Oddly enough, the product of this paradox is a clever little anachronism, and it won a grand prize at the film festival in Cannes last year.

Holiday at its best is a bloodless brother to the old Harry Langdon comedies: a firecracker string of prop gags and pratfalls that takes 85 minutes to sputter itself out. Dialogue is so infrequent that it hardly matters that much of it is in French. The sound track carries little but the punctuation marks--burps, dings, splats, oogahs--for the strictly visual language in which the silly story is told.

Mr. Hulot, played by Jacques Tati, a 6 ft. 4 in. French comic who also coauthored, directed and produced the picture, is a sort of self-winding cuckoo who goes for his vacation to a small beach in Brittany. The horrors of modern travel are hilariously catalogued in a few sharp shots: train travelers hustling, while the loudspeaker blares unintelligibly, from one wrong platform to another; umbrellas locking as two people rush for buses in opposite directions; a bus driver seizing the steering wheel of his crowded vehicle, only to find the head of a small boy sticking up through the spokes.

At the beach Mr. Hulot and his friends soon encounter such traditional terrors as the melted sneakers left in the closet by the previous tenant, the small boy who burns holes in things with a magnifying glass, the pingpong fiend who keeps crawling apologetically under the bridge table to retrieve his ball, the retired colonel who organizes a picnic like a regimental maneuver. By the end of the visit everybody is thoroughly exhausted and goes home to recuperate.

The beauty of Mr. Hulot's Holiday is its elegant sparsity. At the camera, Jacques Mercanton and Jean Mouselle show some of Chaplin's gift for getting the moviegoer exactly where he can see the most in the least time. The cutting from shot to shot is quick as a wink, but the frames are so large and full of sweet sea air that the audience is left with a winning sense of being on vacation despite all the scurry.

The acting, though sharply restricted to vignettes and the mechanics of comic mishap, is so precise as to speak eloquently for Jacques Tati's direction. Unhappily, his own portrayal, often too stilted, is the least amusing of all. Still, Holiday is one of the pleasantest nothings to come out of France since Rene Clair made Le Million, and suggests that a new movie talent has leaped the language barrier.

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