The New Pictures

Cornered (RKO Radio) is ex-Crooner Dick Powell's second try (The first: Murder, My Sweet) in the sort of unshaven, tough-talking role usually reserved for Humphrey Bogart. This time Powell is a Canadian flyer, an ex-prisoner of the Nazis, with an ugly scar on his close-cropped head and a frozen scowl on his face. He is out to get the dirty collaborationist who murdered his young French wife. The chase takes him to South America and into a nest of fashionably dressed, fast-living people who are plainly plotting the next Nazi war of aggression. This shady and suspicious-looking set goes in rather noisily for hard liquor, extra-marital kissing, and murder. Before the picture ends, Hero Powell, with the highest possible moral purposes, has done his share of all three.

Since all of the characters in Cornered are leading double lives, it is no surprise to see any one of them step out of the shadows with a gun in his hand. Murder in an adjoining room does not even interrupt their flow of conversation. Hero Powell is never in any doubt as to who are the desperate characters; they are all desperate. His question -- and the audience's-- is simply: which are the postwar fascists and which are the good guys? Cornered is that newer type of thriller with an up-to-the-minute political backdrop.

The picture's production tricks are obvious enough but very effective: no one ever moves without glancing back over his shoulder; the camera eye blurs with rage as Powell's fists beat & beat at the villain's face; the screen goes black while the hero fumbles about in a dark room ; two characters hold an important conversation near a subway track so that nearly every sentence is suspensefully interrupted by the roar of a passing train.

Among its varied villains, Walter Slezak is outstanding as the sly, slippery, fat one. As the deadpan tough guy, Dick Powell is more acceptable than he ever was as a tirelessly boyish cinemusical crooner. As a thriller--a cinema form which Hollywood often does expertly--Cornered is head-&-shoulders above the average.

Masquerade in Mexico (Paramount) is the kind of movie that even Hollywood has learned to kid itself about: the kind of cinemusical, full of song, formula-romance and predigested local color, that is usually glimpsed casually and piecemeal inside another cinemusical. But this time it is left to stand alone.

Not ten minutes after Masquerade begins, idealistic cabaret Sarongstress Dorothy Lamour finds herself in Mexico City, knee-deep in a diamond theft, and falling in love with Patric Knowles. As a sort of cushion-shot to win his venomous wife (Ann Dvorak) back from her bullfighting Mexican lover (Arturo de Cordova), Knowles helps Dorothy masquerade as a Countess and gives her plenty of opportunity for song and romance with the bullfighter on the flower-strewn waters of Lake Xochimilco.

Because the story has no place to go, it stops whenever it has an opportunity for a song, a gag, an auto chase or a rough-&-tumble fight. Near the end of all the nonsense, Ann Dvorak puts on a ballet, purporting to be about Montezuma but looking something like a barroom engraving of Custer's Last Stand. Although the ballet seems to have been elaborately and lavishly staged, the camera gives it only a routine glance.

The picture's one really funny scene: an opera-mad Mexico City cab driver (Mikhail Rasumny) showing the town to Lamour and singing his spiel.

Danger Signal (Warner) is a yarn about a family of ardent cinemaddicts who are menaced by a type that they should have been adequately warned against: the sleek, mustachioed lady-killer. Armed with a revolver, an engagement ring ironically inscribed "Till death us do part" and a shorthand pad on which his victims write their own suicide notes, the killer (Zachary Scott) goes about victimizing the girls for whatever he can get: love, money, auto rides, or free psychiatric advice. As soon as his ladies begin to lose their first attraction, he reaches for the shorthand pad and the revolver.

Faye Emerson, as a horn-rimmed victim, isn't given much chance to live up to her billing as a lush, dangerous beauty. Zachary Scott, whose best screen performance to date was the simple, down-to-earth Texas farmer in The Southerner, is now being cast by Warner as a no-good city slicker. He makes as much sense as he can of his moronic lines, but the plot machinery jams frequently. Clearly too fast for anyone in the picture, Zachary eventually hastens his own end by tripping over a tree root and pitching over a cliff.

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