The New Pictures

The Seven Year Itch (Feldman Group Productions; 20th Century-Fox) has been hawked across the nation with one of the most teasing promotional campaigns in movie history, culminating last week in a four-story cardboard model of Marilyn Monroe simpering prettily at Times Square while her skirts are being blown up around her hips.

This leering come-on may pull the easily titillated into the theater, but they are doomed to disappointment--for the screen version of Itch has been thoroughly laundered to win approval from the Production Code and the Legion of Decency. In the hit Broadway play, it was fairly clear that Summer Bachelor Tom Ewell went to bed with his pretty neighbor; in the film, undulating Marilyn spends the night with him, but, while she slumbers, Ewell chastely passes the wee hours wrapping up a kayak paddle for mailing to his vacationing son.

Not everything came out in the wash. There still remains in the film a heavy deposit of double-entendre. George Axelrod's play, and the movie he wrote in collaboration with Director Billy Wilder, concerns a middle-aged Manhattan husband who spends the summer in the city while his wife and son are enjoying the Maine breezes. Into his enforced celibacy comes the girl upstairs, an uninhibited hoyden from Denver who powerfully blends naivete with sex--she dunks potato chips in champagne, begs for "more sugar" in her martini, artlessly boasts of posing in the nude, feels that it is all right to do "anything," with Ewell since there is no danger of his wanting to marry her. Ewell is already equipped with a vivid, Mittylike imagination (he daydreams that his wife's girl friend, his secretary and a beautiful nurse all try unsuccessfully to seduce him), and he is swept by alternate tides of temptation and remorse as Neighbor Marilyn gambols about his apartment in a series of elaborate costume changes, each more inviting than the last. The film ends as he flees New York with virtue intact but imagination hopelessly ravaged.

Itch is beautifully mounted in De Luxe-color CinemaScope, and Marilyn Monroe's eye-catching gait is more tortile and wambling than ever. She also displays a nice comedy touch, reminiscent of a baby-talk Judy Holliday. After listening to a Rachmaninoff concerto, Marilyn gets real comic conviction into her voice when she decides it must be classical music "because there's no vocal." Tom Ewell brings the expertise of long familiarity to his part of the agonized husband, but Director Wilder has let several of Ewell's monologues go on a shade too long. In minor roles, Robert Strauss and Donald MacBride also help to slow down the farce pace, while Oscar Homolka, as the psychiatrist, loses most of his best lines in transition from Broadway and delivers the remainder in too impenetrable an accent. Itch should have emerged on the screen as a fast, furious and funny comedy; at times it is all of these, but, continuously, none of them.

Soldier of Fortune (20th Century-Fox) plays out its tiny melodrama against the vast, eye-filling CinemaScope backdrop of Hong Kong harbor. Incredible islands rise perpendicular from the blue sea, and fleets of fishing junks, like floating windmills, drift by on the tide. Ashore, the narrow streets are jammed with the swarming, anonymous humanity of Asia, while high up on green terraces gleam the flowered palaces of the rich.

Into this storybook East comes plucky Susan Hayward, thrusting her determined chin at consular aides, British policemen and inscrutable Chinese who do not seem sufficiently eager to drop everything and help search for her husband (Gene Barry) behind the Bamboo Curtain. As someone defensively points out, her husband--a scoop-minded magazine photographer--knew he was taking a considerable chance when he crossed the Red border without a visa and loaded down with cameras.

Distraught Susan at last turns to Clark Gable. A keen-eyed soldier of fortune who smuggles strategic goods to the Reds, Clark is more interested in releasing Susan from her inhibitions than her husband from jail. But a series of rebuffs (each time he kisses her she responds with a maidenly protest) makes him realize that this is a girl in a million--well, in a thousand. Clark determines to do the manly thing : he will produce her husband and let Susan choose between them.

Springing the prisoner is no more trouble than Hollywood usually finds it. Clark and a couple of pals simply sail up the Pearl River to Canton, sneak ashore, knock two or three Red guards on the head, open the door of precisely the right cell, and escape to freedom with the Reds chasing foolishly after them. Displaying scarcely more hesitation than a plump matron deciding between a chocolate eclair and a napoleon, Susan lets her husband --who seems glad to get away -- fly back to the States, and chooses Clark as her soul mate. Their final clinch halfway up a mountainside is mercifully dwarfed by a staggeringly beautiful panorama of Hong Kong bay.

Davy Crockett (Disney; Buena Vista) has already been seen twice on TV; its theme song brays steadily from the nation's jukeboxes; coonskin hats, flintlock muskets and some 100 other Crockett-inspired products flood U.S. stores (TIME, May 23). Now at last, the film has reached movie theaters, but its belated arrival is far from an anticlimax. Technicolor and the wide screen combine to make this classic tale of derring-do bigger and better than ever. The episodic story has been shortened by 40 minutes but not changed: Davy still fights the Creek War, gets elected to Congress, dies gloriously in the Alamo. Newcomer Fess Parker plays the famed frontiersman with just the right blend of John Wayne and Herb Shriner. And Writer Tom Blackburn has invented a Crockett filled with engaging crotchets: when first encountered, Davy is deep in the piney woods taking time off from Indian-fighting to try to "grin" a bear into submission. This budding effort at psychological warfare fails, and Davy needs a knife to subdue the critter. Throughout the picture, the heroic act is never far removed from the owlish legpull: when Crockett comes prancing into Congress garbed in backwoods buckskins, neither he nor anyone else pretends that these are his idea of city clothes or that his "by-cracky" freshman speech is anything but an act.

Compared to the papier-mache heroes of most Hollywood westerns, Davy Crockett is filled with engaging human imperfections : he loses his first hand-to-hand battle with the Indian chief, Red Stick, and only succeeds in overcoming villainous Mike Mazurki by biting his opponent's thumb. There are some stereotypes--Buddy Ebsen has the familiar role of the trusty pal, and Hans Conreid plays a cowardly gambler with synthetic W. C. Fields flourishes. But, all in all, Davy makes his giant-sized legend come as truly alive as that of Mike Fink, the river boatman, or Paul Bunyan, the peerless woodsman of the Northwest.

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