The New Pictures

Svengali (M-G-M). Faced with making a 1955 movie out of Trilby, George du Maurier's period novel of 1894, Director Noel Langley decided to play the story straight. As a result, moviegoers get a full treatment of the giant-sized nobilities and epic despairs that swirl up from Victorian drama, reflected in the iridescent mirror of fin de siecle Paris.

Essentially, the film chronicles the triumph of British pluck over Levantine cunning. On one side are ranked wholesome Terence Morgan and his fellow painters (Derek Bond and Paul Rogers); on the other looms the hypnotic Svengali (oldtime Shakespearean Actor Donald Wolfit). who drifts about the screen in tattered clothes, rather like a grounded crow. In between is Hildegarde Neff, who makes Trilby, the Irish artist's model, exactly the "great, beautiful, stupid cow" of a woman that Du Maurier intended.

The romance between Artist Morgan and Hildegarde strikes its first snag when he is horrified to discover her posing in the nude for an art class: its second, when Morgan's mother begs Hildegarde not to ruin her son by marrying him. Hildegarde, who has been using Svengali's hypnotism as a sort of aspirin treatment for her headaches, is so unnerved by this classic gambit that she falls completely under Svengali's power. His fell purpose: to make a world-famous diva of her. Morgan searches madly for his lost love until, kicked by a horse, he retires to England and an armchair. Hildegarde, having conquered all Europe with her magic voice (dubbed in by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf), now appears at London's Covent Garden. Morgan rushes to the concert, pits his plain brain and pure heart against the hypnotic evil of Svengali. Love, eventually, conquers all, and Svengali dies, apparently of mortification.

Pete Kelly's Blues (Warner), the second movie that Jack Webb--the big gun on TV's Dragnet--has directed and starred in, is pretty much the same old dum-de-dum-dumfounding stuff, but set in ragtime. Webb has cast himself this time as a sort of Prohibition era Lord Jim with a growl machine, a cornet player in a honky-tonk who caves in to a protection racketeer (Edmond O'Brien) and has to keep running from his conscience with the racketeer riding on his billfold. At last he runs into Janet Leigh, a flapper with more visible flap than the censor generally allows, and he flips back to normal. Yet, at the fadeout, as the old meanie cops his bye-bye tablets, and the hero rides off unscathed on some of the ickiest two-beat ever taped, there is room to wonder if justice was really done.

The picture offers one spiffy spoof of the '205, a Prohibition party with hoofing on the pool table, dunking in the fish pond and a charge at the punch bowl with drawn sabers. And there are some swell lines for those who relish the era's nasal note of prosperous disillusion. "There won't ever be no patter of little feet in my house," drones one pickled tomato, "unless I want to rent some mice." Best of all, Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee sing real well, and pretty often.

As to the rest, somebody has kicked the slats out of the script, the gin-millinery and the sets are corny, and the color is absolutely bloodbucket. It is Actor Webb, however, who sounds the real clinker in his Blues. The man lips onto a horn, or a woman, with about as much feeling as other men show for a K ration. His self-effacing style of behavior,, designed to set him off as the calm eye of hurricane scenes, makes him instead, when the mood is less violent, a sort of hole down which all meaning and interest disappear. The funniest frame, for instance, was not meant to be funny: Actor Webb is seen standing beside a wooden Indian, and for a moment it is hard to tell them apart.

Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (20th Century-Fox) has Hollywood once more trying to unite East and West and, once more, proving it is not meet that the twain shall meet. Han Suyin (Jennifer Jones) is a stately Eurasian doctor in Hong Kong, much finer than any of the resident Europeans or Chinese. At a cocktail party she catches the eye of Mark Elliott (William Holden), a dashing U.S. correspondent, who is every bit as noble-souled as she. Having met, they fall in love, and the camera patiently escorts the lovers to a native festival, an isolated bathing beach, and to the top of a windswept hill. Every time they look deep in each other's eyes, the theme song swells to a crescendo. She murmurs cryptic remarks about life and love; he responds with equally neat epigrams. It's all pretty Confucian.

But there are problems. Jennifer wants to give her life to medicine and to China. Bill has a mean wife who refuses him a divorce. In madcap fashion they fly off to Macao for an illicit week together, but Holden is torn from her arms by orders from the home office: war has broken out in Korea. Now the movie settles down to a long stretch of letter-reading--that is, Jennifer reads the letters on the screen, but Bill's voice, vibrant on the soundtrack, recites the words. Then comes Many-Splendored's twist ending. Usually, in pictures like this, it is the beautiful half-caste who must die. But Hollywood has grown up. This time it is the American hero who gets killed.

Based on the autobiographical novel by Han Suyin (TIME, Dec. 8, 1952), the movie has moments when the love affair seems believable and truly splendored, but not even the accomplished acting of Jennifer Jones and William Holden can consistently lift the film from its morass of sentimental fudge.

The Man from Laramie (Columbia) has been distinguished in ten selected cities across the U.S. with a publicity gimmick that is more inventive than anything in the movie: newspaper ads invite the public to "call Jimmy Stewart," and list a phone number. Those who do so can then hear the never-grown-up rasp of Jimmy's voice delivering an earnest recorded plug for Jimmy's latest movie.

The movie needs all the publicity help it can get. Jimmy is a U.S. cavalryman burning to avenge his brother, slain by the Apaches. Disguising himself as the bossman of a mule train, he sets out for a small town on the edge of Apacheland and, unloading his merchandise, moves out to some nearby salt lagoons to get a cargo for his return trip. Suddenly a line of horsemen come galloping along the skyline. Apaches? No, it's a psychotic cowboy (Alex Nicol) and his henchmen. Before you can say "Oedipus complex," Nicol has galloped down the ridge, lassoed Jimmy, dragged him through a bonfire, killed his mules and burned his wagons.

Jimmy is now twice as hot for revenge as before. He trails Nicol into town, thrashes him and then pitches into Nicol's keeper, Arthur Kennedy. This brawl is suspended by the arrival, in turn, of Nicol's father (Donald Crisp), who owns all the country for miles around. He offers to pay damages for the mule train if Jimmy will just leave town. But then, where would the picture be? So Jimmy sticks around, makes mild love to Cathy O'Donnell, outfights a treacherous assailant, shoots Nicol in the hand, exposes Kennedy as a seller of guns to the Apaches and, in short, tidies up a multitude of loose ends in time to ride off as Cathy O'Donnell stares wistfully after him; she doesn't know where he lives, doesn't even know his phone number.

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