The New Pictures

Hobson's Choice (London Films; United Artists) is a cheerful little slice of death, warmed over and served with some lively comic sauces by Producer-Director David Lean (Brief Encounter, Great

Expectations) and Actor Charles Laughton. The corpse in the case is the British lower middle class, the people Novelist Arnold Bennett found when he lifted the rock of Victorian respectability.

Laughton plays the part of a widowed tradesman, a better-grade booterer whose three daughters have reached the physical age for marriage. Father, however, has reached the mental age where he cannot let them go, especially when a substantial marriage portion goes with each one. The old terror stalks from his "rightful 'ome comforts" to his "reasonable refreshment" at the pub, bragging in one place about his eminence in the other, while his daughters run the business for him and see their suitors on the sly.

All at once, the eldest daughter (Brenda de Banzie), a spinster of 30 winters, announces that she is going to wed the boothand from the cellar (John Mills), with or without father's permission. When father shows them the door, the two set up a rival shop and soon have most of the old man's business out of his pocket.

What a period comedy generally needs is a strong hand in the cutting shears. Surprisingly, Director Lean has succumbed too often to a temptation to stand there with his shutter hanging open and stare at a prodigious exhibition of facial calisthenics. Laughton smirks, pouts, bug-eyes, belches, quivers his wattles, sleeve-wipes his nose, and generally golliwoggs it to a degree he has not attained since The Private Life of Henry VIII.

Too much Laughton leaves the audience feeling that there has been too little Brenda de Banzie and John Mills, who are excellent as the spinster and her workingman suitor.

The Long Wait (Parklane; United Artists). Mickey Spillane is not a writer to duck the vital issues. The first movie made from one of his mysteries, I, The Jury (TIME, Aug. 7), was a warning to psychoanalysts to stay out of the numbers racket. The second is apparently an ad for amnesia.

Anthony Quinn, a bank teller who has lost his memory, has it jogged by the police, who want him to remember that he has robbed the bank and killed a man. Quinn, clever enough to know where memories are likely to get lost, sets out on an intimate rummage through the bedroom of every pretty girl he wishes he remembered.

"Man, you're smooth!" says the first of them (Shawn Smith), and Quinn begins to rumba toward a sofa, gently oscillating her pelvic region with a towel. "Don't press your luck," warns the second (Mary Ellen Kay), but it is not his luck that Anthony presses.

At the third doorbell (Dolores Donlon), Quinn plays the gentleman and invites the girl to go out with him. "I can't," she says. "I haven't a thing to wear." So she and Quinn stay home. Last stop is a girl named Venus (Peggie Castle), but by this time Quinn seems a little too tired to play an adequate Adonis.

The pleasures of amnesia also include a chance to punch the daylights out of a fatso-&-so (Bruno Ve Sota), and to give two other villains a fatal case of lead poisoning. When Hero Quinn finally gets his memory back, it seems almost an unhappy ending.

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