The New Pictures

The Foxes of Harrow (20th Century-Fox) may easily be confused with the Foxes of Hollywood. A generation before the Civil War, Stephen Fox (Rex Harrison), a riverboat gambler, becomes a Louisiana plantation owner. He calls the place Harrow and imports a beautiful but not very compliant vixen (Maureen O'Hara) from New Orleans, to become Mrs. Fox.

On their bridal night Stephen gets drunk and breaks down her bedroom door. Although they seem to do nothing but snarl at each other from then on, this refined bit of symbolism results in a son. As a sort of judgment against them, the son is born clubfooted. Stephen works hard to make a man of him--too hard to suit mother. Eventually the little boy, hearing his parents quarrel, falls downstairs and dies. The stockmarket does the same.

Mrs. Fox beards her husband in the Rampart Street den of his fancy lady and implores him to come back and try to save what is left of their worldly goods and of their lives. He is just getting around to the latter project, with his first cooperation from her, when, after two long hours, the picture ends. The moral appears to be that money isn't everything.

All this to-do is as expensively and prettily produced as if anyone could possibly care. Probably because the author of the original bestseller, Frank Yerby, is a Negro, the best thing in the picture is a more than ordinary interest in slaves and their lives; but even this feature is drowned in ornateness and theatricality.

Desire Me (MGM) is a rather peremptory title that is taken pretty seriously by Greer Garson, Robert Mitchum and Richard Hart, all of whom pretend, with varying degrees of success, to be French.

Mr. Hart, a rat of the Paris sewers, tells Miss Garson that her husband (Mr. Mitchum) died before his eyes, as a prisoner of war in Germany. Since the audience knows that Mr. Hart knows that Mr. Mitchum is alive, it is clear that he desires Miss Garson more than he ought. Believing his story, and tired of "waiting" (a word used in this film as a ten-ton synonym for celibacy), Miss Garson somewhat disconsolately, but uncensorably, starts desiring Hart.

Just as they are about to leave the quaint fishing village for Paris and married love, Mitchum turns up from years of imprisonment, with a beard and more desire than both of them put together. A beautifully photographed fog promptly descends, through which the three principals grope, knife, shoot and shout their way toward a predictable ending.

The research that evidently went into Desire Me pays off in some pleasant background detail about old-world religious festivals and fairs; but most of the picture smacks of the studio. There is a beautiful stone house on a beautiful stretch of shore: it looks like a fine place to live in, but the principals who live there are not plausible enough to deserve the privilege. Once in a while Greer Garson demonstrates that a good actress is jailed inside all the suffocating wax that the studio has molded around her. Newcomer Richard Hart makes a cagey, personable deceiver. Robert Mitchum tries a Gallic gesture now & then but most of the time he just looks sleepy. No audience will blame him much for that.

Song of Love (MGM) is a movie biography of Robert and Clara Schumann and their close friend Johannes Brahms. Paul Henreid softens his cheeks into a persuasive facsimile of Schumann and, far more importantly, plays him with dignity and understanding. Clara Schumann, one of the great women of her century, was presumably free from Katharine Hepburn's narrow, rather collegiate type of jitters. But Miss Hepburn portrays Clara with skill and feeling. She is fascinating to watch at the piano, using the clawlike 19th Century style; her "reactions" to the men's music, in various dramatic contexts, are the backbone of the picture.

Brahms was doubtless as thoroughly German as Robert Walker is American, but Walker is agreeably simple in the role. Henry Daniell is elegantly expert as Franz Liszt. Artur Rubinstein has himself a busy, interesting time backstage, ghosting the sound track in his idea of the piano manner of all four musicians.

The essential quality of this film is its obviously honest effort to be true to the true story, in spirit if not in fact. The drama is presented gently, modestly, on a domestic scale, so that its characters, their feelings, even their music, are often in sharp and intimate focus. Most of the music is small scale, too; a beautiful little piece of Schumann's, Dedication, is wisely chosen and often but delicately played. As a novelty for which every cinemaddict should be grateful, there is not a single one of those montages, suggesting a concert tour, with multiple dissolves of rain-drenched concert bills, slanted keyboards hammered fortissimo, and applauding hands.

The lives and the music are somewhat distorted, as is usual--and never entirely forgivable--in such pictures. But this is how Brahms and the Schumanns might very possibly have acted if they had realized that later on they would break into the movies.

Ride the Pink Horse (Universal-International). At one point in this movie an Indian girl is offered a ride on a merry-go-round and is given her choice of horses. She chooses the pink one. Unless Robert Montgomery is some sort of symbolic pink horse too, this incident has nothing to do with the rest of the picture; but it is one way to get a title.

Montgomery, who also directs the movie, comes to a small town in New Mexico to put the bite on a notorious war racketeer (Fred Clark). This villain is a tycoon who has a lot of power in the Southwest, and some nasty looking bodyguards. Would-be-blackmailer Montgomery is not as bright as he is brave. It is so small a town that he could surely have found his victim's hotel merely by walking down the main street and keeping his eyes open. But in order to help the scriptwriters (Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer) corral their characters, he chooses the back streets, where he asked the way of Indians and half-caste girls. One of the girls (Wanda Hendrix), by some kind of aboriginal second sight, perceives him as a man about to die and conceives a mute devotion towards him. She shows him the hotel and tags after him, helpfully, through the rest of the picture.

He finds that an elderly G-man (Art Smith) is also after the crook. The picture develops into a sort of three-legged rat race, carried on against the background of a small-time posh hotel, a grim little cantina and a turbulent fiesta. The movie has some well-written, better-spoken tough talk, plenty of menace, and some sharp violence. A good deal of it is just routine pocket thriller. But thanks to Director Montgomery and Producer Joan Harrison there is also some good New Mexican location atmosphere.

As with most thrillers, the picture suffers from vagueness. The characters are presented with motives that are so intangible and so multiple that none of them comes convincingly to life. But Montgomery is a likable performer and Newcomer Fred Clark is a gifted and vigorous one. Plump Thomas Gomez has a ripe old time character-acting. Ride the Pink Horse doesn't really jell as the unusual picture that it evidently set out to be, but it is an amusing melodrama, cross-lighted with intelligence and good intentions.

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