The New Pictures

Indiscreet (Grandon; Warner), in the Broadway version (Kind Sir), was the sort of romantic comedy that is all dressed up but obviously has no place to go--but then, Broadway scarcely has the resources that are required to gild this sort of lulu. Instead of $100,000, the movie's Producer-Director Stanley Donen had about $1,500,000 to squander. Instead of painted flats, he had the city of London for his backdrop, and some of the city's stateliest halls for his interiors. Instead of nature's timid hues, he had Technicolor. Instead of a couple of merely famous names--Mary Martin and Charles Boyer--on his marquee, he had two of the biggest that have ever been in the business--Ingrid Bergman and Gary Grant.

Bergman plays an actress--world-renowned, spectacularly attractive, loaded with money--who lives all alone, next door to Buckingham Palace, in an apartment the size of an armory, with nothing but a couple of dozen Picassos and Rouaults and Dufys to keep her company, and a devoted Rolls-Royce to follow her whenever she takes a walk. Grant plays a wizard of international finance --world-renowned, spectacularly attractive, loaded with money--who falls in love with the girl, and expresses his affection in those little things that women appreciate so much: yachts, paintings, diamond bracelets.

In fact, just about the only thing this paragon does not give his paramour is his name. "I'm sorry," he says sadly, "but I'm married, and I can't get a divorce." She accepts the explanation along with his advances, but a few months later she discovers that he is really not married at all. Naturally enough, the lady is vexed. "How dare he make love to me and not be a married man!" And she hatches an absurdly sinister plot, involving "the other man," to make the bluffer suffer. But the plot miscarries in a very funny scene, and before long, the relationship is satisfactorily altared.

In short. Indiscreet is a conventional comedy of what Hollywood supposes to be upper-class manners, but it is flicked off in the high old style of hilarity that U.S. moviemakers seem to have forgotten in recent years. Director Donen deserves a cash-register-ringing cheer. Actress Bergman, always lovely to look at, is thoroughly competent in the first comedy role that she has played for Hollywood. And Gary Grant is in a class by himself when it comes to giving a girl a yacht.

Cinerama-South Seas Adventure

(Stanley Warner Cinerama Corp.)makes a radical departure from the four Cinerama films that preceded it (and grossed $74 million along the way). It attempts a story. In fact, it attempts five of them. But in the end, after having been carted all over the South Pacific, viewers will feel as travelogy as ever.

Slipping in unabashed commercial plugs for the Matson Navigation Co. and a Honolulu restaurant named Don the Beachcomber's, Narrator Orson Welles oozes into the tale of a girl from Akron who suffers from "the total lack of coconut palms in her home town." She heads out for Hawaii, meets another girl on shipboard and eventually, in Hawaii, the other girl's brother. Intones Commentator Welles: "Perhaps her heart would beat even faster if she knew what Ted was thinking." Ted is thinking that he wants to show her the islands, and together they fly over the volcanic craters of Kilauea and Haleakala, dance away the nights and, in a curious reversal of roles, lie patiently on the sand while a dog goes surfboarding.

Abruptly, with no effort at transition, Adventure switches focus to a young French painter who yearns for the Gauguintuan lushness of Tahiti. From then on, it is Tonga, Fiji, the New Hebrides, New Zealand, Australia, with never a suggestion of a connective narrative. Sometimes the sound track loses touch with the movie, as when the narrator oohs about Tonga's 6-ft. 3-in. Queen Salote, who never appears. But the real pity is that the Cinerama producers, who proclaimed in 1952 that Cinerama can do anything the regular movies can, and do it better, have never been willing--or able--to tackle anything more active or dramatic than a mountaintop.

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