The New Pictures

Suspicion (RKO Radio) is good Alfred Hitchcock--up to the last few minutes. In those final minutes the picture falls apart at the seams.

This squashy failure by the squash-shaped master of intricate melodrama (The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, Rebecca) can perhaps be attributed to RKO's box-officiousness; Suspicion's principals (Gary Grant and Joan Fontaine) must be kept alive and kicking.

Suspicion (based on Francis Iles's Before the Fact) opens with the authentic Hitchcock touch: a conversation in a railroad train speeding through a pitch-black tunnel. The picture tells the story of a charming, highborn, impoverished British wastrel (Mr. Grant) and his marriage (for love and money) to a sensitive, sensible daughter (Miss Fontaine) of a retired English general (Sir Cedric Hardwicke).

After honeymooning on borrowed money, the bride discovers that her husband is penniless; the groom, that his wife's income will not support them. When he turns embezzler, his loving wife begins to see the tragedy they are headed for. But she cannot break away. She suspects that her husband has murdered his best friend (Nigel Bruce) and intends to murder her for her life insurance.

She never finds out whether or not these suspicions are justified. Husband Grant is such an accomplished liar, poseur and likable bad boy that he fools everybody, including himself. The climax comes when he motors her to her family home for a rest. On a cliff by the sea he apparently tries to shove her out of the car. After convincing her that he was only trying to keep her from falling out of the car, they turn around and head home.

This dippy denouement spoils the picture, but it does not spoil the excellence of many of its parts. Actors Grant and Fontaine make very attractive love to each other, turn in a high-grade performance. And, thanks to Hitchcock's tricks (letting the camera wander down cliffs, pause disturbingly on people's faces), the film has a texture that can almost be touched.

Sometimes over-mental, illogical, actionless, Suspicion has enough Grade-A Hitchcock in it to be notable, even in failure. Best example: a Government crime-laboratory expert, carving his broiled fowl at the dinner table with the deadly scalpel strokes of a surgeon dissecting a cadaver, pauses to comment: "A very interesting corpse dropped in the other day."

The Chocolate Soldier (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is apparently a new kind of double-feature picture. It has the title and some of the music of Oscar Straus's 33-year-old operetta, The Chocolate Soldier. For libretto, it has the plot of Ferenc Molnar's 30-year-old play, The Guardsman.

These two tried-&-true shows, excellent by themselves, together make up a sapless hybrid. Particular stumbling block is The Guardsman's plot: the predicament of an actor who, to satisfy his wife's yearning for amorous adventure and to satisfy himself that she is faithful to him, dresses up in the uniform of a guardsman and tries, hoping he will fail, to cuckold himself. The demands of this ticklish situation (used by M.G.M. with minor changes) are simply beyond the histrionic capacities of the picture's two principals: wholesome, husky Risoee (rhymes with Pisa) Stevens, young (28) Metropolitan Opera demidiva, and dimpled, impassive Nelson Eddy, 40, who looks like a Midwest swimming coach.

Although the operatic baritone and the contralto (whose first cinemappearance is, nevertheless, impressive) handle the skittish libretto like a pair of pouter pigeons, they are quite at home in their singing roles. The Straus melodies (My Hero, Sympathy, the title song, etc.), written originally for a lyric soprano and a tenor, have been rearranged and somewhat streamlined. Better are some of the picture's other tunes, Moussorgsky's Song Of The Flea (courtesy of Mr. Eddy), Saint-Saens' My Heart at Thy Sweet Voice (Miss Stevens), and Wagner's Evening Star (duet).

The music doesn't fit the plot, and vice versa. The fun of The Guardsman was that the audience never found out whether or not the wife knew it was her husband all the time. M.G.M. makes it painfully clear that she knows it before the picture is half over. The lilt of the Straus score fails to come through the wayward story.

As one M.G.M. publicist put it: "Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer has been very generous on this picture--really two shows in one. . . ."

The Men In Her Life (Columbia) is unfair to luscious Loretta Young. It requires her to be "a bundle of muscles and a smile." Soft-voiced, convent-schooled Miss Young, now 28 and a veteran cinemactress, can supply the smile but not the muscles.

Cast as Europe's ace ballerina (one Lina Varsavina), Loretta limps bravely through one dying-swan triumph after another. She neither looks, acts nor walks like a ballerina, but in sequences which permit her to be more or less herself she performs ably.

The men in Varsavina's life give her no end of trouble. They are three: Stanislas Rosing (Conrad Veidt), who snatches her from a circus, makes her a great dancer, marries her, dies; Roger Chevis (John Shepperd), who dies before he can marry her; and David Gibson (Dean Jagger), rich U.S. shipbuilder, who marries her but lives to tell the tale.

The Men In Her Life (taken from Lady Eleanor Smith's novel, Ballerina) was originally scheduled as a picture for Vera Zorina, whose ballet-conditioned muscles (plus a more inspired script) might have made something out of this old-world period piece. As it is, the picture takes a long time saying that the lot of a ballerina is indeed tough.

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