The New Pictures

The Big Clock (Paramount) is a slick screen version of Kenneth Fearing's thriller about a press lord (Charles Laughton) who murders his blonde mistress in a moment of pique. Too late he recalls that he was seen entering the girl's apartment by a man, identity unknown. The publisher sets out to find the witness. He puts the super-sleuthing editor (Ray Milland) of his detective magazine on the trail. Milland is told that he is after "a payoff man in an enormous war-contract scandal," but it doesn't take him long to find out that he is really chasing himself: he was the witness.

To keep Sleuth Milland precisely equidistant from himself and the killer takes the kind of nerveless skill required to shave two men with one stroke of a two-edged razor--and produces the same excruciating suspense. Author Fearing's book pulled off the trick very neatly, but Scenarist Jonathan Latimer and Director John Farrow have done an even better job of it in the movie.

As the harried bloodhound, Ray Milland is as surefooted as ever. Laughton falls to with relish on the great chunks of deep-dish villainy that the script feeds him. Elsa Lanchester (Mrs. Laughton, offscreen) does a good bit of broad comedy as an emancipated artist with four children and no husband.

Palsan (Mayer-Burstyn) links together half a dozen short stones, each with different characters, and ranges from Sicily to the River Po. At its best, it beats any other movie the Italians have made. Its unity is in its theme: the relationships between men at war (chiefly U.S. soldiers) and the men & women native to the battleground. Paisan (rough G.I. translation: "bud") was directed by Roberto Rossellini, who made the famed Open City.

The stories:

1) A G.I. whose language is strictly from New Jersey, tries to reassure, and flirt with, a half-grown Sicilian girl who knows no English. A German sniper kills them both. 2) A Neapolitan street boy steals the shoes off a drunken Negro soldier. When the Negro spots him later, and sees a little of the neolithic life of Naples' poorest people, he loses interest in his shoes, and learns that U.S. Negroes are not the only unlucky people on earth. 3) A Roman girl, turned prostitute, picks up a besotted soldier, and slowly comes to recognize him as the boy she began a happy relationship with on the day of liberation, when they were both decent human beings. 4) With Florence under shellfire and contested by partisans, a U.S. nurse and an Italian friend run desperately through the empty, hazardous streets, in search of her former lover, a partisan leader. 5) Three U.S. chaplains--a Roman Catholic, a Protestant and a Jew--visit a deep-country monastery. The monks, surprised by the presence of the Jew, are deeply disturbed because the Catholic chaplain is making no effort to convert his two friends. 6) In the grandly desolate marshlands which edge the Po, a group of Italian partisans (with some Russian, English and American helpers) are hemmed in by the Germans, trapped and finally killed.

Although there seems to be an honest attempt to show Americans complete with their faults, the cumulative tone of the picture is painfully sycophantic towards the U.S.; so much of it is recorded in English that one wonders whether it was made for home consumption at all. But the movie has enough good in it to make its bad spots seem negligible.

The Sicilian episode is the weakest of the bunch; but the half-savage, bewildered, terrified girl (Carmela Sazio) in her outgrown child's dress is enough to make the whole film memorable. In the Neapolitan episode the camera squares off on the Negro, squatting giantlike on a heap of slithering rubble, and merely watches him, for a long time, while he yells and pantomimes his boozed-up, bitter, tragic fantasy of returning in triumph and wealth to the U.S. Passionately well-acted (by Dots M. Johnson, an amateur), and wonderfully directed, it is a stunningly successful scene. In the Roman episode, Rossellini spoils an otherwise perfect scene with a corny bit of breast-peeping that Hollywood would blush at; but Maria Michi (of Open City) is so good as the girl and Gar Moore is so well cast as the G.I. that in nearly every gesture and inflection they are worth a thousand pages of "social study" of the corruption of two peoples, the Occupier and the Occupied.

In the Florentine episode the racing through the streets is really just an excuse for a camera tour of an embattled city.* For pure visual excitement and cinematic brilliance, this is the peak of the picture; it is as if the magnificent, forlorn perspectives of Chirico were alive with menace and sudden death. The all-round richest and best episode, the last, which seems to derive in spirit from Malraux, is a whole world war and revolution isolated in microcosm, and is as fine a piece of war fiction as the movies have achieved.

To the Victor (Warner), made in France with 36,000 French-frozen Warner dollars, tries with a tourist's zeal to do everything at once: explore the French political underground, examine black-market operations, expound a social philosophy, tell a love story, follow several intrigues and visit points of interest in Paris & environs.

The heat of these exertions proved a little too much for Director Delmer Daves, who has done much better jobs (The Red House, Dark Passage). The plot is heavy with cliches and the camerawork is so prettied up that even the true Paris looks suspiciously like a studio backdrop.

After various escapes and chases, the camera pauses in the museum of natural history to peer through the disembodied bones of a dinosaur; at this point, Black Marketeer Dennis Morgan realizes that unless he mends his ways, Man too may soon become extinct. So he gets not only a social conscience, but also the girl (Viveca Lindfors). Whippet-trim Miss Lindfors, Hollywood's new Swedish import, and the sinister Joseph Buloff, an actor who has learned to giggle like a crocodile, are very much worth looking at. Otherwise, this film is tediously routine.

* Rossellini uses street shots he made, with a hand camera, during the actual fighting.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.