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Sleep, My Love (Triangle; United Artists) is a rather fishy thriller about a sleek fiend (Don Ameche) who enlists the help of a fake psychiatrist (George Coulouris) to drive his wife (Claudette Colbert) to insanity and/or suicide. Claudette is rich and Ameche is crazy for a gold digger (Hazel Brooks). An eligible Bostonian (Robert Cummings) traps the villains after some narrow squeaks.

The story scarcely matters except as an excuse for some scare scenes, which are pretty well filmed, and some scare characters, who are amusingly played. George Coulouris uses his trapezoidal shoulders effectively. Hazel Brooks, as a prettied-up version of the Dark Lady of Cartoonist Chas. Addams' horror house, is fine in her part and fun to look at.

You Were Meant for Me (20th Century-Fox). The life & works of jazz musicians offer material for a fine movie. Some day the moviemakers may take intelligent advantage of the fact. But You Were Meant for Me isn't even as good as it was six years ago, when Fox made a similar picture called Orchestra Wives.

The story: a brash, rising bandmaster (Dan Dailey), the toast of the corn belt, marries a small-town girl (Jeanne Grain) and, just as he snags his first Manhattan date, collides with the '29 depression. He is proud; his wife is sensible. He tries to keep up a front; she knows that there is no front to keep up. When they retreat to her parents' home, he won't even get up mornings--much less lend a hand in supporting the family. After several reels of this sort of thing, everyone working on the picture evidently said the hell with it; for the show ends as abruptly as a chair pulled out from under. The most interesting question suggested by the whole venture: Is Hollywood trying to brace the public for another depression?

Jeanne Grain has sensitive eyes, but she uses them with as little restraint as a ham singer's tremolo; her considerable charm needs good direction. All Dan Dailey needs is a good picture. Oscar Levant gets along all right, good show or bad, with his peculiar brand of vinegar. One obvious tip for those who make would-be "nostalgic" musical movies: the old arrangements for the old songs are fully as nostalgic as the melodies. Frequently the fancy new arrangements are terrible; always, they sabotage the nostalgia.

I Walk Alone (Paramount) brings Burt Lancaster, a distinctly old-fashioned gangster, back from stir, to find that his onetime partners have become nightclub owners and won't cut him in. When he tries to muscle in, he discovers, in a sourly amusing scene in which modern business methods are explained to him, that mere brute force is helpless against the intricacies of interlocking corporate structure. Aside from this scene, the movie has little interest except for some good work by Kirk Douglas and Wendell Corey as Burt's enemies, some spasms of fair melodrama and plain brutality. Lizabeth Scott walks through the show--in a manner presumably intended as alluring--as if she were lying asleep on a vertical bed.

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