The New Pictures

The Girl Can't Help It (20th Century-Fox) marks the debut as a movie star of Jayne Mansfield, who has already achieved a tape measure's worth of fame through publicity stills. The plot is frankly built around the 23-year-old platinum blonde's physical proportions. A gangster who wants to marry Jayne has given an agent six weeks to build her up into a famous singer. The agent protests: "Rome wasn't built in a day." The gangster retorts: "She ain't Rome. She's built."

Edge of the City (Jonathan; MGM) is a movie with a message: a man is ten feet tall. That, in fact, is the title of the Robert Alan Aurthur TV play from which Author Aurthur adapted the movie. The unusual thing about the film is that the message is delivered by a Negro (Sidney Poitier) to a white man (John Cassavetes). Surprisingly enough in a Hollywood movie, the Negro is not only the white man's boss, but becomes his best friend, and is at all times his superior, possessing greater intelligence, courage, understanding, warmth and general adaptability. The mystery is why so engaging a Negro would waste time on so boringly primitive a white man.

The Wrong Man (Warner). When the true story of Manny Balestrero was printed in the newspapers a few years ago, it made a strange and haunting tale. On the afternoon of Jan. 13, 1953, Balestrero, an $85-a-week bass player at Manhattan's crusty, upper-crust Stork Club, went to the office of a Long Island insurance company to raise a small loan on his wife's policy. The next evening he was arrested and "positively identified" by two of the insurance company's employees as the man who months earlier had robbed the office at gunpoint of $271. An innocent victim of mistaken identity, Balestrero was booked, fingerprinted, spent a night in jail, had to face suspicion and publicity, raise $5,000 bond, and defend himself as justice took its ponderous course. His wife cracked under the strain, and was placed in an institution. Even so, Balestrero was lucky. Between a mistrial and preparations for retrial, the real thief was caught, and confessed to the crime.

As a true story, Balestrero's ordeal had drama, heart tugs, near tragedy, even, with his wife better, an upbeat ending. As fiction, with Henry Fonda playing Balestrero, the drama, heart tugs and near tragedy have been dissipated. Director Alfred Hitchcock, in a change of pace from his usual suspense formula, seems to have been so impressed with having a true story to tell that he gave it a completely literal rendering. Turning the story into fiction without fictionalizing, he stripped it of its emotional impact; by sticking to the facts, he missed the truth.

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