The New Pictures

The Loves of Carmen (Columbia] gives red-haired Rita Hayworth a chance to play one of fiction's most durable hussies. To give Rita's millions of fans their money's worth, Columbia has spared nothing, not even the horses: the movie has splashy Technicolor, spicy love scenes, a talented cast, lavish sets, a stagecoach robbery, plain & fancy violence. It is only a well-dressed western with gypsy trimmings, but it is entertaining in an oldfashioned, simple-minded way.

With her doom plainly forecast in the first reel, Rita is allowed to flounce from bed to worse, leaving a litter of broken taboos that the Johnston office would not permit if she were a virtuous heroine who could live happily ever after. For love of this heartless wench, men die like flies, beginning with an unctuous colonel of dragoons (Arnold Moss), and ending with poor Don Jose (Glenn Ford). Since wickedness does not pay, Carmen at last ends up with a knife in her own alluring torso. As the gypsy cigarette girl, Rita has a chance to spit, snarl, bite, slap, kick, dance, sing (in Spanish), pull a knife and, of course, exercise her deadlier blandishments. The film's limitations are largely those of its star, though it manages some tension in such rough & tumble scenes as the one where Don Jose and Garcia (Victor Jory) hack at each other with trowel-sized knives. The story is based on the Prosper Merimee novel and does not make use of the music from Bizet's opera. It is prettier and more exciting than the opera could ever be without the score--but nothing about it begins to match Bizet's music.

Merimee and Bizet made Carmen a classic, but Columbia is bent on making it literally a household word. Thanks to a staggering variety of studio tie-up deals with manufacturers of assorted items, the nation may soon be trying vainly to comb Carmen out of its hair. Already on the Carmen bandwagon as it begins to roll through retailers' showcases and advertising columns from coast to coast: shoes, handbags, cigarettes, hosiery, soap, cosmetics, hats, scarves, hair ornaments, castanets, costume jewelry. An impressive seller in its own right is the "Carmen doll" ($6.98); through 30,000 retailers, it piled up $1,000,000 in orders within its first 20 days on the market. "Carmen castanets" to be used as a "wolf-call" will be pushed as a national fad among teenagers.

Arthur Murray has been persuaded to teach the "Carmen Flamenco"; Novelist Sophie Kerr has ground out a 30-part serialization of the movie that the N.E.A. syndicate will offer to some 600 newspapers; Pocket Books, Inc. has issued a 25-c- edition of the Merimee novel, plugging the movie on the cover; John Powers has selected a Carmen-type model; Manhattan Psychiatrist Dr. Frederic Wertham has put Carmen on the couch for a psychoanalytical study and has concluded: "The world is full of Carmens."

Pitfall (Regal Films; United Artists) is the sort of melodrama in which an ordinary guy gets into extraordinary trouble. The guy (Dick Powell), a claims adjuster for an insurance firm, is a happy homebody with a wife (Jane Wyatt) and child (Jimmy Hunt). But duty requires Dick to investigate a Pitfall (Lizabeth Scott). He spends a fervid evening with her and even kisses her, right in front of the camera. This dalliance generates plot complications that put one man in the morgue and another in the hospital. As the picture ends, it is clear that Dick's wife is going to make marriage as unpleasant as possible for both of them for the rest of their lives.

To enjoy this kind of movie you have to be able to like some of the people involved--or at least to care what happens to them. Dick Powell is about the only person in the cast it is possible to like, and the longer the show goes on, the harder it is to believe that he has good sense. When he finally does come clean, his wife's reactions to the truth are unqualifiedly abominable, and remain so. But it is obvious--and hard to bear--that Dick and everyone else connected with the making of this movie regard her as an ideal wife whose abominableness is completely justified.

A Date with Judy (MGM) features a song called Strictly on the Corny Side, which might serve as the movie's theme song. Date has a few moments of appealing teen-age humor, but most of it is overcomplicated plot about lovestruck adolescents and their immature parents. The juveniles (Jane Powell, Elizabeth Taylor, Scotty Beckett, Robert Stack) may be forgiven for acting like ambitious hams in a high-school play, but the hardened adult "troupers (Wallace Beery, Leon Ames, Carmen Miranda) also suffer repeated attacks of squirming coyness. Most of the cast, too, is larded over with a fiery red makeup that would look fine on a Connecticut barn. On Technicolored actors it looks terrible.

Embraceable You (Warner) is dispensable entertainment. Dane Clark, chauffeuring a gunman away from a killing, hits & runs from a pedestrian (Geraldine Brooks). Geraldine is almost as thorough a guttersnipe as Dane is. But according to this story, there's a lot of good in even the worst people. In any case, the boy remorsefully visits the girl in the hospital, never letting on, of course, that he was the driver. The girl, too, is pretending; she doesn't really feel sick at all. But Dane learns from the doctors that he has given her an inoperable whatsis, of which she is bound to die--suddenly and soon. Needless to say, the doctors do not let her know. Neither does Dane. Neither does the gumshoe (Wallace Ford) who orders Dane, on pain of imprisonment, to make her happy while she lasts. Dane wants to do that anyhow; in no time at all now, they are going to be in love. Dane even goes against his boss, in order to raise funds. The boss is so resentful that from then on Dane's life is in as much danger as Geraldine's.

It is very sad to see what love can do towards regenerating these two kids-who-never-had-much-of-a-break-in-the-world. But the real, soggy lump in the throat during all the love scenes is that you know, and Dane knows, that Geraldine may cork off at any moment; and that Geraldine doesn't know it at all. The makers of this movie, not caring how morbidly sentimental they got, obviously hope that it will tear your heart out.

Coroner Creek (Columbia). For a reason which he carefully keeps to himself, Randolph Scott, the hero, stalks and finally gets George Macready, the heavy. During the unnecessarily long time the job takes, he becomes foreman for a ranch-owning widow (Sally Eilers), converses occasionally with a lady (Marguerite Chapman) who runs a hotel with photogenic interiors, and is chivalrous to the heavy's drunken wife (Barbara Reed). Although these ladies plainly suffer serious emotional upsets every time he comes near them, Randolph scarcely seems to notice. He is much too busy riding up, down and across the landscape, looking resolute.

He also engages in an unusually brutal fight with the heavy's henchman (Forrest Tucker). One novel detail of the fight: they stomp one another's trigger fingers into bone splinters. When, at last, it is made clear that Scott is avenging his murdered fiancee, it is easy enough to understand why he hates the heavy and turns up his nose at the girls; the only mystery is why he waited till the last reel to explain himself.

It is pleasant to see Sally Eilers again, even as a hungry widow; all the other players do all right, too, within the modest requirements of this kind of piece. The Cinecolor, as usual, is fine so long as the colors are low-keyed, but in open sunlight, all outdoors looks like a roast beef special.

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