The New Pictures

Melody Time (Disney; RKO Radio) is a crowded 75 minutes of song-illustrated animation involving: 1) skating lovers, tintype style, emulated by rabbits; 2) Rimsky-Korsakov's bumblebee, tormented by a boogie bass; 3) Johnny Appleseed, advised by a Guardian Angel in a coonskin cap; 4) Donald Duck, Joe Carioca and Organist Ethel Smith in the throes of a samba; 5) an apotheosis of Joyce Kilmer's Trees; 6) a young tugboat named Little Toot which disgraces and redeems itself; 7) a tall-tale, free-for-all finale about Pecos Bill, his horse Widow-maker and his gal Sluefoot Sue.

These items are variously sung, brassed and narrated by such entertainers as the Andrews Sisters, Waring's Pennsylvanians, the Sons of the Pioneers, Roy Rogers, and Trigger, the Smartest Horse in the Movies, who looks perfectly capable of reciting the Gettysburg Address but keeps a more discreet silence than his colleagues.

The things that used to be best about the best Disney movies are now so emphatically good that they verge on mere blatancy; the old weaknesses have grown a hundred times their old size. The draftsmanship is becoming rigid and frigid in a kind of gift-shoppe stylization. The outbursts of pure energy, though more restrained than in The Three Caballeros, still seem touched with homicidal mania. Nearly every attempt at cuteness, sweetness, tenderness, sublimity, results in one or another kind of painful simper. There is a frequent, unscrupulous alternation between the dreamy shimmer and the bang on the snoot.

On the other hand, the straight technical expertism is still one of the wonders of the movie world. The plain raw slapstick and character comedy are the best to be found--except in better Disneys--since the comic masters of silence. And in every opportunity for the eerie, the cruel, the ghostly, the terrifying, the darkly and mysteriously sad, genuine creative inspiration jumps to life.

Up in Central Park (Universal-International) is the story of Boss Tweed in a Currier & Ives setting. A colleen (Deanna Durbin), just off the boat from Ireland, flirts with a whiz-bang muckraker (Dick Haymes) from the New York Times. Her illiterate father, in all innocence, fattens zoo pheasants for the table of sybaritic.

Boss Tweed (Vincent Price). When Rake Tweed entices Deanna down to an intimate supper, papa tags along and spoils everything. It all came right in the end; and that is why, today, we have PM, democracy, and the 10-c- subway fare.

Miss Durbin, prettily as she sings, still seems more like a canary than a woman; and by & large this production, like the musical comedy from which it is derived, is at best merely the least unpleasant way of surviving a class in civics.

The Lady from Shanghai (Columbia) is a piece of sleight of hand by Orson Welles. The big trick in this picture was to divert a head-on collision of at least six plots, and make of it a smooth-flowing, six-lane whodunit. Orson brings the trick off.

The main plot: Orson, a "philosophical" merchant seaman who finds it "very sanitary to be broke," signs for a long yacht cruise because Rita Hayworth, who much prefers to be filthy rich, will be aboard. For love of her, he also signs a phony confession to a supposedly phony murder. When the murder turns out to be real, Orson finds himself caught in a frame and the toils of the law. He escapes, literally, through an optical illusion: the real villains of the piece mow each other down in an amusement park's House of Mirrors.

The film sometimes lies limp under such feeble abracadabra, but sometimes it stands on end at a weird glimpse of real black magic. Everett Sloane, as Rita's lame and jealous husband, crawls through the picture as horribly as a spider; and Glenn Anders, as a man who madly plots his own murder, has developed a soundless laugh as chilling as a razor's edge scraped across plate glass. Orson has done a capable job with his brogue, a flashy one with the camera. But not all of his magic works. He makes a blonde out of his onetime wife, redhead Rita Hayworth, but not an actress.

...

Orson Welles, back in Hollywood last week, called The Lady from Shanghai "an experiment -- in what not to do." He figures he was trapped into making it by Columbia's Harry Cohn, who lent him $60,000 to get him out of a hole, made him promise to make a picture to pay it back. "But I'm not bitter," says Welles.

"It taught me how to shoot a sexy dame singing a song and stuff like that." Welles has spent the past six months touring Italy, mostly vacationing. But he tossed off Cagliostro, a film biography of the great 18th Century charlatan, in between an audience with the Pope, an interview with Togliatti, and writing occasional pieces for the New York Post. "I've never seen what I wrote in print," he says. "It was like writing in sand.*

" Welles is now at work assembling his quickie film version of Macbeth, which he shot in only 21 days.

He will soon return to Italy to make a movie for Britain's Sir Alexander Korda --based on Luigi Pirandello's difficult Henry IV. Says Welles: "So much first-rate talent is going in the direction of the literal. I don't even like the word 'documentary.' You can't go on proving that a rusty faucet is rusty and a dirty alley is dirty. They are using the camera as a recording instrument. I want to use it as an instrument of poetry."

*Or in thin air. None of the pieces was printed.

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