Summer Murders

Dragnet (Warner) is the second major television show--I Love Lucy led the way with The Long, Long Trailer (TIME, Feb. 22 )--to make the tricky segue from the electronic to the silver screen. The transition is fairly well accomplished in a general way, though sometimes what goes big in the parlor gets lost in the movie house (e.g., the staccato monotone, urgent and effective when the actor is only ten inches high and has to exaggerate plenty to get attention, is just a meaningless affectation when he is 20 feet tall).

In their first movie case. Sergeant Friday (Jack Webb ) and Officer Frank Smith (Ben Alexander) are assigned to discover who put the blast on a bookie's runner with a sawed-off shotgun. The audience is avalanched for the thousandth time with infinite details of police procedure. Relief is provided in the usual Dragnet style by tight little tick-offs of "types": a dainty curator of natural history, a folksy cardsharp, the victim's hard-drinking, one-legged wife.

There are also plenty of head-on brutalities (the audience gets the twelve-gauge square in the face) and a few feeble sideswipes of vulgarity ("Your mother sure didn't do much for a living." "That's all right; she didn't bark"). And the quarter-truths in Richard L. Breen's screenplay ("Why does the law always work for the guilty?" "Because the innocent don't need it") zip by so fast and frequently that sometimes they almost blur into an honest statement.

Suddenly (United Artists). Frank Sinatra, who ably made the switch from crooner to yardbird last year in From Here to Eternity, now proves there is plenty of ham on the famous skinnybones.

Plotted and photographed in a bare, newsreelistie--styler-Suddenly tells how Sinatra and two other toughs, in the pay of a foreign power, try to kill the President (unnamed) when he detrains in a small town called Suddenly (because it makes a good title for the film). Sinatra demonstrates that the years of microphone fixation, aggravated perhaps by the recitation of popular-song lyrics, have given him a full command of pathological gesture; but through no fault of Sinatra's, the pathology takes up so much screen time that moviegoers might fittingly be provided with white coats. Still, the general impression is that he acts a good deal more imaginatively than he ever sang. Good shot: the triggerman, boobytrapped by an automatic rifle wired up to a high-voltage line, twitching convulsively as he squeezes the trigger and beats out a ballistic boogie.

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