The New Pictures

Stage Fright (Warner) is a comedy melodrama that most moviemakers could be proud of. For Director Alfred Hitchcock, who must compete with his own overpowering reputation, it is something less. Far superior to his recent, blighted Under Capricorn, it is hardly in the running with such oldtime Hitchcock classics as The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes.

Never a man to make things easy for himself, Director Hitchcock has tried in Stage Fright to work within the discipline of a tricky story conceit: his heroine (Jane Wyman) plays romantic nip & tuck simultaneously with a suspected murderer (Richard Todd) and the Scotland Yard man (Michael Wilding) who is tracking him down. Hitchcock exploits the situation as much for chuckles as for chills. The result is an entertaining show, handsomely produced against a London background, studded with effective scenes and enlivened by an excellent cast that includes an uncannily young and beautiful Marlene Dietrich and able British Comedian Alistair Sim.

Even so, coming from the director who once doted on torturing his audiences with suspense, it is a disappointing film. At its best, melodrama should gull the spectator into believing what he sees, if only while he is seeing it. In working out Stage Fright's intriguing premise, Hitchcock tortures his story more than his audience, burdens them both with too obvious a load of improbabilities.

Nor does Hitchcock come up to his old high mark in his use of British humor. Though it tries for more laughs than it gets, the comedy is funny enough to give the script its major distinction. But the fun no longer serves the shrewd purpose to which the director put it in The Lady Vanishes, where it lent extra point to the suspense. In Stage Fright the humor is mainly incidental, and pursued at enough length to slacken the story's tension.

The unalloyed virtues of the picture lie in the quality of its performances. Jane Wyman is completely winning as a student actress who tries to clear a murder suspect by impersonating the maid of a musicomedy star. Wilding plays the detective with quiet charm, and Todd's acting as the suspect will not let down moviegoers who liked him in The Hasty Heart. Comedian Sim makes his artful most of the heroine's eccentric father. If anyone steals the show, it is Veteran Dietrich. Dressed to kill and chanting languorous ballads in a husky off-key, she creates an acid-tinged portrait of a glamorous bad lady of the theater.

Malaya (MGM) squanders Spencer Tracy, James Stewart and a name-heavy supporting cast in the kind of adventuresome folderol that lesser studios crank out regularly on small, starless budgets. Such high-priced talent probably seemed worth using while the story was still an idea based on an authentic wartime scheme: the smuggling of rubber out of Japanese-held Malaya. But the picture beats the basic idea into pulp fiction.

Before abandoning itself to derring-do, the film tries briefly to ring true by doggedly underplaying its account of how Stewart, a down & out newspaperman, persuades the government to free a convicted smuggler (Tracy) and send the two of them off on the rubber-smuggling project. The understatement is so clumsily overdone and ill-suited to the characters and situation that it defeats its own end.

From then on, despite a little painful poetic prose in the dialogue, action fans should like such redblooded, simple-minded stuff as an unarmed Tracy tangling singlehanded with five Japanese soldiers. Actor Stewart is badly oppressed by an overearnest, callow role which makes Tracy's breezily relaxed performance look even better than it is. With little to do but dress up Sydney Greenstreet's Malayan saloon, Italian Actress Valentina Cortesa still makes it worth a moviegoer's while to keep his eyes on the screen.

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