The New Pictures

And Then There Were None (20th Century-Fox), a whodunit that concentrates on atmosphere, is more sultry than chilling. Its ten shady-looking characters are herded off to a soggy, cheerless house-party on a windswept little island. The reason for this melancholy get-together is soon apparent: each of the guests has gone unpunished for one or more crimes, and the anonymous host has decided to impose rough-&-ready justice on his own. What happens from then on is menacingly suggested by the title.

Under the manipulation of French Director Rene Clair, this Agatha Christie yarn becomes good, glossy cinema without much excitement. In the halting, early stages it seems as if ten--or even five--corpses are going to be too many for one feature-length film. But as soon as the cast is thinned down to working consistency, three expert craftsmen--Barry Fitzgerald, Walter Huston and Roland Young, as splendid old scoundrels--are given a chance to peer, leer and sneer it up for all they are worth. With Louis Hayward and June Duprez to add youth & beauty, the last five survivors manage to make a mildly interesting stretch run for the finish.

Blithe Spirit (United Artists) is as light-spun and unsubstantial as a cornucopia full of cotton candy. For people who like that kind of thing, it will be just as tasty. It is 99.9% Noel Coward, with his trademark of fashionably airy dialogue on every frame of film.

For 22 months Manhattan theatergoers were titillated by the stage play. The film's plot is the same: British Novelist Charles Condomine (Rex Harrison) lives stylishly in the English countryside with a stylish wife (Constance Cummings) and is badgered by the unladylike ghost of his first wife (Kay Hammond). Producer Coward and Director David Lean have done little more than photograph Author Coward's play. In focusing the main attention on the brightly brittle script, they have overlooked a rule which Hollywood rarely forgets: to hold their customers, cameras have to keep on the go. Result: Blithe Spirit is surfeited with dialogue, now & again drowses slightly.

But one violent stimulant never fails to wake everybody up: Margaret Rutherford's unceasingly funny impersonation of Madame Arcati, the medium who conjures up the ghostly troubles of the Condomine menage. In a brilliantly conceived mixture of types, Miss Rutherford bounces through the proceedings with all the healthy hilarity of a Girl Guide while she raises hob with the spirit world and her own.

Captain Kidd (United Artists) has long been a synonym for a colorful public menace.* Seeing him in this new screen portrait, today's young cinemaddicts, teethed on TNT and entering an atomic adolescence, may find him a trifle archaic.

Kidd (Charles Laughton) buries a treasure chest, sails a King's ship into Madagascar waters, knocks off a number of chiseling colleagues, and at long last gets the halter while young lovers Randolph Scott and Barbara Britton make for the altar. All this and more is accomplished without teeth-clenched daggers, plank-walkings, or hoistings of the Jolly Roger. But this new version has not enough energy and inventiveness to take the place of the old, dependable pirate-movie cliches.

Mr. Laughton, however, produces his usual ripe performance and now & then, with the help of a knowing script, puts some good fun into the show. Sample: Arch-Chiseler John Carradine, a blackmailer secure from assassination, interrupts his captain's wistfully murderous musings with the reminder that they guarantee the gallows. Kidd's reply, delivered in steepest, nastiest English: "Spoil spoaht!"

*Kidd declared that he was innocent of piracy. Nevertheless, he was convicted of both murder and piracy and was hanged on May 13, 1701 at Execution Dock.

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