The New Pictures

Private Life of an Actor (Siritzky International) is the first film made by Sacha Guitry, France's scampish old do-it-all of stage & screen, since he was cleared of charges of collaborating with the Nazis. The movie was mildly applauded in Paris, but stirred up an anti-Guitry demonstration in Lyon (TIME, June 7). On its own account, it is worth little fuss of any kind. It is a tribute, redolent of grease paint, to Sacha's famed actor father . Lucien. The son's brittle wit shows to best advantage when he is dishing out impudence, irony and disillusionment. This film suffers from an irony of its own: reverence and honest sentiment do not become M. Sacha Guitry.

Rope (Transatlantic Pictures; Warner) is an Alfred Hitchcock thriller. The story: two young men, fresh out of college, strangle a young friend--just for the thrill --and hide the body in a chest.To sharpen their excitement and selfesteem, they serve a buffet supper, off the murder chest, to the victim's father (Sir Cedric Hardwicke), sweetheart (Joan Chandler), unsuccessful rival (Douglas Dick) and a beloved former teacher (James Stewart).

One of the murderers (Farley Granger) is horrified by what they have done and gradually comes apart. The other (John Dall) is almost hard enough to carry them both. He is particularly excited by the presence of the teacher, a sort of armchair nihilist who first infected the boys' minds with the idea that there are superior men, above all moral law. Dall really wants to lay the corpse at his master's feet, the way a cat brings in a slaughtered robin. When he finally does, he finds that the teacher's endorsement of murder was always purely academic.

In its original form (Patrick Hamilton's play, Rope's End) this was an intelligent and hideously exciting melodrama. It has been well adapted by Hume Cronyn, but it was probably inevitable that in turning it into a movie for mass distribution, much of the edge would be blunted. The boys in the play--who were pretty clearly derived from the Loeb-Leopold case--were highly cultivated, effeminate esthetes. So was their teacher. Much of the play's deadly excitement dwelt in this juxtaposition of callow brilliance and lavender dandyism with moral idiocy and brutal horror. Much of its intensity came from the shocking change in the teacher, once he learned what was going on. In the movie, the boys and their teacher are shrewdly plausible but much more conventional types. Even so, the basic idea is so good and in its diluted way Rope is so well done that it makes a rattling good melodrama.

In photographing the action, Director Hitchcock brought off a tour de force. There is not a single cut in the film; it was shot on one set, in solid ten-minute reels, and the end of each reel dissolves into the beginning of the next. The action is continuous for 80 minutes' playing time. The flow of time is elegantly caught (in Technicolor) in the changing light on the Manhattan skyline, as seen through a huge window. This way of shooting necessitated split-second alertness in movement and timing. The professional movie camera is an enormous machine, but Hitchcock kept it moving on his smallish, crowded set as freely as a dancer. Furniture and whole chunks of set had to be whisked out of the camera's way as it prowled and pried among the players, then replanted as promptly and silently, to meet the camera's turning eye.

This Hitchcock stunt also required of the actors a sustained discipline that is fairly new to the screen. The result is quite exciting. Continuous action builds a tension all its own. The players, too, are keyed unusually high by the intensity and interest of trying something new, so that, although their performances are elementary, they have a vividness and vitality which are rare in current movies.

Two Guys from Texas (Warner). Jack Carson (comedy and song) and Dennis Morgan (romance and song) stop off at a dude ranch run by quite a looker (Dorothy Malone), who can also sing. The act the two guys put on in the patio, for the other guests, would probably break the monotony of life on a dude ranch more successfully than it breaks the monotony of watching this picture. The guys are suspected of theft but finally catch the real crooks. They are moderately amusing when they horse around with a psychiatrist (Fred Clark). They even appear, in caricature, in an animated cartoon dream sequence. It is all pretty pointless, but inoffensive.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.