The New Pictures

The Velvet Touch (RKO Radio) opens with a furious quarrel. A Broadway actress (Rosalind Russell), famous as a drawing-room-comedienne, wants to move on to roles like Hedda Gabler and to move out on her producer and ex-lover (Leon Ames). He tells her contemptuously that he made her what she is, that she couldn't play Hedda for peanuts, and that if she leaves him he will publicize her Past. At this point Rosalind crowns the rotter with a statuette.

Will she get away with the murder? She has a pretty good chance, but she suspects that she is suspected. Detective Sydney Greenstreet keeps scaring her with his overpoliteness, and even her new sweetheart (Leo Genn) darts her an occasional fishy look.

The whole business is very sleekly done and is fairly suspenseful and entertaining. But all the intelligence and talent are wasted in putting a high polish on emptiness. The show is a solid necklace of carefully matched cliches. Rosalind Russell is competent in her rangy, highly stagy role, but she skillfully avoids proving whether she can, or cannot, play Hedda.

On an Island with You (MGM) is a harmless little hot-weather cooler, filmed in a watery Technicolor haze. Sarongs are worn by the girls (Esther Williams, Cyd Charisse) and summer whites by the men (Peter Lawford, Jimmy Durante). The story, all about the warmed-over infatuation of a Navy pilot for a movie star he met on a U.S.O. tour, was also meant to be air-conditioned, but it gets a bit humid. Swimmer Williams should not have been asked to impersonate a film actress, but in her aqua-ballets and posturings in a bathing suit, she is a fine sight to see. Durante, at one point, reads a script line that sounds dangerously like a capsule review of On an Island: "I should have stayed in vaudeville. Then this wouldn't have happened."

Walls of Jericho (20th Century-Fox) is a protracted and generally unrewarding study of life in a Kansas county seat during the Teddy Roosevelt era. The principals: a politically hopeful lawyer (Cornel Wilde); his drunken wife (Ann Dvorak); Lawyer Wilde's newspaper editor friend (Kirk Douglas); his sumptuous bride (Linda Darnell); a young girl (Anne Baxter) who has secretly worshipped Lawyer Wilde from her pigtail days.

The editor's bride is a born troublemaker. At her earliest opportunity she makes a pass at Wilde and never afterward forgives him for not tumbling. She high-pressures her guileless husband into a political career and into sabotaging his old friend's political prospects. She unearths and exploits the Wilde-Baxter love affair. She is clearly not the kind of woman who is useful around any town, and in the long run people find her out. After that, they live, more or less happily, ever after.

There are glimmers of reality and interest all through Jericho: Linda's creamily venomous politeness at small-town parties; Douglas' intelligent performance; several of the scenes between Wilde, ill-cast and limited though he is, and the three women who make him such a lot of trouble; Anne Baxter's sincerity in her love scenes.

When the picture is concentrating on character and on the look and life of a small town, it is better than average. But the overall story is inflated; elaborate and unlikely, and the picture tells its story as doggedly, and pokily, as if it were worth such serious attention. The longer it goes on, the duller it gets.

Mine Own Executioner (20th Century-Fox) is the story of a London lay psychiatrist (Burgess Meredith) who takes on a tougher case than he's sure he ought to handle. Somewhere between neurosis and insanity, a young veteran (Kieron Moore) has tried to strangle his bride. Before the psychiatrist can uncover the root of the trouble, the young man shoots his wife and kills himself.

Woven through this melodrama is the complex story of the psychiatrist himself, his professional work and private fevers. He is neither miracle man nor mad scientist, as Hollywood so often presents men of his trade. The audience can respect his talents while fearing for his fallibility. There is ham in him, and cold conceit, as he changes face and voice from one patient to the next. He mistreats his wife and dallies with a blonde (Christine Norden), unhappily wondering why he can't be as useful to himself as he is to some of his patients. In short, the psychiatrist is a conscientious man, but the tensions and ambiguities of the veteran's case have to contend with his own fatigue and personal preoccupations.

Ordinarily, such complications merely confuse a movie. In this intelligent production they enrich the picture's general interest and sharpen the melodramatic suspense. Meredith's performance, his best in a long time, could carry the picture singlehanded ; Dulcie Gray is highly satisfactory as his clumsy, devoted wife; and the handsome but somewhat wooden Kieron Moore is effectively used. The picture, made in England by Fox, is well filmed and has a climactic scene high on a fire ladder which is an excellent piece of pure scare.

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