The New Pictures

. A Star Is Born (Transcona; Warner) is a massive effort, unreeling ponderously for three hours and two minutes, to convert the Hollywood legend into something like Wagnerian musicomedy. The producers assumed astonishing risks. The story and the title were borrowed from a famed old Academy Award winner (1937) that has been shown to death on television in recent years. Furthermore, the star, Judy Garland, was a 32-year-old has-been, as infamous for temperament as she is famous for talent.

What's more, all the producers' worst dreams came true. Day after day, while the high-priced help--including Judy's husband, Producer Sidney Luft-stood around waiting for the shooting to start Judy sulked in her dressing room. In the rid, Star took ten months to make, cost about $6,000,000. But after Judy had done her worst in the dressing room, she did her best in front of the camera with the result that she gives what is just about the greatest one-woman show in modern movie history.

The picture's old familiar story Norman Maine (James Mason), a hard-boozing screen lover, meets a blues singer named Esther Blodgett (Judy Garland), realizes that she could be terribly important not only to millions of fans but to him. He gets her a screen test; she becomes a great star--and his wife. . As her star rises, his drops. Just as she is about to give up her career to save his soul, he saves her life by ending his. The wife pulls herself together and goes on --and so a star is born.

All this, plus a dozen big musical sequences, makes Star a mighty long gulp of champagne; but, like champagne, it is hard to refuse. Simply in the writing, for instance, there is a sureness rare in musicomedy librettos--and no wonder: Poetess Dorothy Parker worked on the 1937 script, and Playwright Moss Hart had that to draw on for this one. There is some fine Hollywood off-camera stuff: the great star being fastidious about his amours ("Too young. I had a very young week last week"); the little nobody taking her screen test ("Cut!" the director bellows in horror, "we saw your face!").

The Technicolor is a little too muddy for comfort, but the players wade around in it bravely. Charles Bickford plays the big producer with vigor, and Jack Carson is a howl as a pressagent. Actor Mason right to his alcoholic end, glows with a seamless health and handsomeness that may delight the pinup trade but will hardly convince anybody who has ever had a hangover.

As for Judy, she has never sung better. Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin have given her six good songs--among them one unforgettable lump in the throat, The Man That Got Away. Her big, dark voice sobs sighs, sulks and socks them out like a cross between Tara's harp and the late Bessie Smith.

An expert vaudeville performance was to be expected from Judy; to find her a dramatic actress as well is the real surprise --although perhaps it should not be In such pictures as Wizard of Oz, The Clock and Meet Me in St. Louis, Judy showed the first flutters of a nature that could give and sympathize deeply, even where it could not control. In Star the control is still unsure. But the confidence of the heart--which shows in the sudden warm going-under-now look in the eyes--is impressive. Everything she does is a little overdone, but it is a pleasure to see such things done at all. Everybody's little sister, it would seem, has grown out of her braids and into a tiara.

White Christmas (Paramount) is a sentimental recollection of the 1942 musical Holiday Inn, in which Bing Crosby first sang the song White Christmas. From the first scene (Christmas 1944) to the last (Christmas 1954), it is blatantly the I "big musical," a big fat yam of a picture richly candied with VistaVision (Paramount's answer to CinemaScope), Technicolor, tunes by Irving Berlin, massive production numbers, and big stars. Unfortunately, the yam is still a yam.

The plot revolves around a handsome wide-smiling, fatherly ex-general (Dean Jagger) whose ownership of a nice old white inn in Vermont (remember the inn in Holiday Inn?) is endangered by business conditions. Two of his former men (Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye), who since the war have made a big success in show business, come to his rescue. They throw a benefit at the inn, and call on all the old man's old soldiers to help out. Meanwhile, they are able to do a good turn for a sister act (Rosemary Cloonev and Vera-Ellen).

A couple of the tunes (Sisters, Count Your Blessings) may do very well with the jukebox trade, but except for the title piece, Composer Berlin is considerably below his top form. Throughout most of the picture, Crosby just doesn't Bing. Rosemary Clooney, as his girl friend, gives him no very exciting reason to. Even Danny Kaye seems a little depressed. He has only one really adequate line ("When what's left of you gets around to what's left to be gotten, what's left to be gotten won't be worth getting whatever it is you've got left"), but he does manage, in one spanking fine sequence with Dancer

Vera-Ellen, to remind the world that when he wants to, he can move shoe leather with anybody short of Fred Astaire.

Hansel and Gretel (Michael Myerberg) shows what the Machine Age can do to an old folk tale. Based on Engelbert Humperdinck's 1893 children's opera, Hansel is a 72-minute Technicolor production built around a new gimmick: electronically controlled robots with hands, eyebrows, and bodies that move.

The novelty quickly wears off. As "Kinemins," Hansel and Gretel are too human for fantasy, too clumsy on their magnetized feet to pass for real. Only with Rosina Rosylips, the witch, does Producer Myerberg bring his brainchild close to life. Swooping happily on her broomstick or chortling over Gretel ("She makes my mouth water" "I'm so glad I caught her"), Rosina Rosylips is fine fun. For the rest, despite Humperdinck's music and Evalds Dajevskis' eerily beautiful settings, Hansel is hoist on its own technology.

The Black Shield of Falworth (Universal-International). After sitting through three full-color CinemaScope treatments of the Middle Ages (Knights of the Round Table, Prince Valiant, King Richard and the Crusaders) in the last six months, one schoolboy complained that he was "beginning to feel middle-aged." A weary wag some years his senior replied by recommending The Black Shield of Falworth as distinctly "the lesser of medievals." Actually, The Black Shield is better than that. In sheer athletic thwack-in the vim with which buffets are fetched and weasands slit--it is one of the jaw-jarringest things of its kind since Douglas Fairbanks' 1922 Robin Hood.

The Fairbanks on the current job is 29-year-old Tony Curtis, who plays the broadsword, mans the barbican and generally acrobattles with such enthusiasm that no one should be disturbed by a few Curtis crudities. Example: when he kisses a girl--in this case Janet Leigh, who is Mrs. Curtis in private life--a great wet smack is heard all the way to the back of the theater.

The story of the picture, based on a novel, Men of Iron, by Howard Pyle, concerns a rash child (Actor Curtis) of the 14th century who doesn't know his own father. To find out who he is, the young man takes service as a squire with the kindly Earl of Mackworth (Herbert Marshall), quickly wins distinction with his arms--in the bower of milord's pretty daughter (Actress Leigh) as well as in the joust. In the end, Curtis clears his father's name, puts the crunch on the villain, gets the girl--and saves the state.

In fact, everything is just as it ought to be in such a picture. Oscar Brodney's scenes are fast and well-organized, Rudolph (Dodsworth) Mate's direction is firm and businesslike. Best bit is are working of a famed Charles Laughton scene in Henry VIII, a demonstration of medieval good manners ("the little things that distinguish the gentleman''; in which Actor Torin Thatcher daintily raises a whole haunch of mutton to his lips, graciously gnaws at it for awhile, then flings it airily over his shoulder--the left shoulder, that is--to the floor.

Operation Manhunt (MPTV Corp.; United Artists). Igor Gouzenko was trained by Soviet military intelligence to be persistent, and he learned his lesson well. In 1945 the former code clerk in Ottawa's Russian embassy exposed to the Canadian government a Red ring that was stealing atomic secrets. In 1948 his adventures gave Hollywood the excuse and the plot for a vivid anti-Soviet spy thriller, Iron Curtain. Last July he published a powerful novel, The Fall of a Titan, about Russian officialdom, and how one of its high-ups got cut down. Operation Manhunt, a sort of sequel to Iron Curtain, is still another piece of pretty effective anti-Communist propaganda inspired by eager Igor.

The manhunt of the title is an attempt by the Russians to find Gouzenko (Harry Townes), whose whereabouts are a Canadian state secret, and to liquidate him. The suspense coils down tight as Gouzenko is lured to a rendezvous with death, and there is a jack-in-the-box finish to send everybody home happy.

Will Kuluva, as the Russian spymaster, radiates the impersonal menace of a prescription for arsenic, while as Gouzenko, Townes suggests very gracefully a sort of soulful bureaucrat. Unluckily, there is an epilogue in which Gouzenko himself appears, wearing a black cloth mask that makes him look like an executioner. In deed, if the picture survives, it is not because he fails to lower the ax.

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