The New Pictures

Beau Brummell (MGM) is a $3,000,000 spare-no-expense attempt, egregiously cast, costumed and colored (in Eastman Color and Technicolor, too), to take the moviegoer on an elaborate tear through 18th century England. Censorship being what it is, the spectator generally has to take the vulgar intention for the vicious performance: he sees the ornate Regency sofa, but not what happened on it. Art Director Alfred Junge and Costume Designer Elizabeth Haffenden are in fact the real hero and heroine of this picture. The script (based on the old Clyde Fitch-Richard Mansfield heart-tugger that had four runs on Broadway) just moves the actors briskly from one gorgeous set to the next, and by the time the audience has finished inspecting the splendid costumes and furnishings, it is too late to notice that the scene has, often as not, been grandiosely flubbed.

Hollywood's Beau Brummell (Stewart Granger) bears little relation to the historical one. George Bryan Brummell was the younger son of Lord North's private secretary. While at Eton he awed a somewhat older Etonian, George Brunswick, for life. Since George happened to be Prince of Wales, Brummell had no difficulty in entering high society, and was soon acknowledged "absolute monarch of the mode." Even the Prince of Wales once "began to blubber when told that Brummell did not like the cut of his coat." But at last the Beau and his patron had a falling-out; Brummell's gambling debts went unsettled, and he fled to France, where he died in 1840 of paresis. In the film Brummell is at one moment a fribble fellow who orders his dressing gown to match his sheets and his boots buffed with champagne. Or again, he is the glorious adventurer. At the end of the picture, he dies in a Calais garret, with the King at his side, of a genteel consumption taken, as he says, when he "shared a carriage with a damp stranger."

As Brummell, Stewart Granger probably gives the best performance of his career. By nature an admirable clotheshorse, he just lets nature take its course and since he hardly bothers to act, the audience is hardly bothered by his acting. As his paramour, Lady Patricia, Elizabeth Taylor behaves so naturally that sometimes a Regency gala seems almost as sophisticated as a Hollywood high-school prom.

Director Curtis Bernhardt (The Merry Widow) has done some inspired casting: Peter Ustinov plays the Prince of Wales and Robert Morley his potty papa. These two amiable monsters, as shapelessly alike as two corpulent snails, seem to be engaged in a contest to see who can stick his long-stemmed eyeballs farthest out of his head. Morley, as the monarch who "talks to trees [and] mixes paint with his feet," is the winner by a cornea.

Three Hours to Kill (Harry Joe Brown, Columbia) might be called a saddle-soap opera. The heroine (Donna Reed) is a girl in "trouble," a sort of Stella Dallas of the Purple Sage, and pretty grim about it too. To make matters worse, she doesn't even get the hero (Dana Andrews) in the end.

Not that he is worth getting. Although this is Andrews' fifth western, he still jumps when the gun goes off, and he obviously hates to punch almost as much as he hates to be punched.

The hero, who has been framed with a killing, rides into town to clear his name. It is not quite clear why he bothers: his name cleared, he just rides out again. Furthermore, it turns gut that the villain is not even the villain. About that time one of the actors mutters desperately, "Why did all this have to happen?"

The BarefootContessa (Figaro-United Artists) starts off as a series of expert thrusts through the tinsel of the perennial Hollywood rags-to-stardom saga. But Writer-Director-Producer Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who has successfully charred his bread and butter before (All About Eve). this time reaches so hard for significance that he loosens his grip on the ironic Hollywood spoof he almost has in hand.

Unwound in Technicolor flashbacks from the graveside of the heroine (Ava Gardner), the story has a few startlingly good lines and situations--and several embarrassingly bad ones. Ava is a slum-bred flamenco dancer in Madrid when a tyrannical millionaire turned moviemaker (Warren Stevens) shows up with his slavish pressagent (Edmond O'Brien) to look and maybe to buy. But Ava, no easy mark, will have none of it until the millionaire's cynical, broken-down director (Humphrey

Bogart) persuades her to take a screen test in Rome. True to form, untouchable Ava is soon in bright lights from coast to coast.

But all is not well with Ava's own heart. She only feels at home "with my feet in the dirt." And while waiting for her dream prince, she keeps earthy trysts with guitar players, chauffeurs and gypsy dancers. Meanwhile she merely flirts with Millionaire Stevens and a South American playboy (Marius Goring), until at last she finds true but tragic love with an Italian count (Rossano Brazzi).

In the telling, Contessa trails a shoestring of good description: the Riviera, where the "international set gathers the way an annual fungus gathers on a beautiful tree"; the public-relations counselor, "who can be many things--some of them punishable by law"; the unusual Hollywood romance: "You could tell it was for real, because they never gave out interviews about getting married."

But even the neat lines, Bogart's expert delivery and some effectively acid scenes fail to make Contessa much more than an international-set soap opera.

Woman's World (20th Century-Fox) is a petticoat version of Executive Suite, with the big job depending this time as much on the wife as on the man. The waspish corporation boss (Clifton Webb) summons his three top district managers; the best man & wife team will get the vacant general managership. The three nervous couples show up: an ulcer-ridden, self-made man (Fred MacMurray), at odds with his wife (Lauren Bacall); a tough, reticent Texan (Van Heflin) and his full-bodied, social-climbing mate (Arlene Dahl); a family man from Kansas City (Cornel Wilde) and his too-enthusiastic wife (June Allyson).

Jean Negulesco, who has played mixed doubles before (Three Coins in the Fountain), uses the same formula in Technicolored Manhattan instead of Rome. Shuttling from one couple to the next, he tries to combine broad farce with narrow moralizing on success, at humor's expense. But before the best man wins the $125,000 job, there are a couple of laughs. Best scene: the feline bedlam of a hundred half-dressed women of all ages and shapes battling for cut-rate dresses in a bargain basement on 14th Street.

Rogue Cop (M.G.M) is another Hollywood stab at realism in the manner of TV's Dragnet. Robert Taylor is a veteran city detective in the hire of a pair of grafty little Caesars (George Raft and Robert Simon). When Taylor's kid brother (Steve Forrest), an honest rookie cop, identifies a smalltime toughie who can betray Raft and Simon, Sergeant Taylor tries in vain to get the deal squared. Inevitably, the honest brother is bumped off, and the bad brother sees the light. With Janet Leigh's assistance, Taylor hunts down and rubs out the killers in a routine gunfight.

Only the supporting actors lift Rogue Cop out of its mediocrity. Olive Carey, as a scruffy old crone of a stool pigeon, is convincingly reluctant to sing for free. George Raft is the same old master of reptilian menace. The lesser cops and crooks look real enough, but Janet Leigh is too sweet and winsome as a reformed tart; Detective Robert Taylor strolls from pillow to punch, always immaculately and incredibly well-groomed, even for an overpaid cop.

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