The New Pictures

A Letter to Three Wives (20th Cenury-Fox) is a bright, unusual comedy that sets itself some high hurdles and clears them all--mostly with room to spare. The picture begins as three young matrons in station-wagon suburbia learn that one of their husbands has run off with a feared and envied local charmer. Leaving the runaway husband's identity dangling (neither the wives nor the audience is in on the secret at first), Writer-Director Joseph L. Mankiewicz explores each wife's marital security in three long flashbacks. Then, with considerable skill and a sort of hard-bitten humor, he pulls off an ending that is adroit but fair, surprising but credible, and warm yet not sticky with sentiment.

Mankiewicz has wisely grouped his three episodes so that the film gets better as it goes along. The first sequence, which is the only one to suffer from glossy traces of the story's slick-magazine origin, catches an ex-farm girl (Jeanne Crain) in a panic of social inferiority to her husband (Jeffrey Lynn) and his friends.

The second sequence, which has a strong satiric bite, hits a more realistic standard. It details a crisis in the home of an idealistic schoolteacher (Kirk Douglas) who rebels at the way his wife (Ann Sothern) helps earn the family living, i.e., by writing soap operas. In spite of the glass house it lives in, Hollywood here throws some viciously well-aimed stones at radio.

The final episode makes one of the screen's most refreshing matches--Paul Douglas as a hard-boiled big shot and Linda Darnell as the beautiful but shrewd shopgirl who outmaneuvers him into matrimony. Filmed with wit and insight, their courtship is the classic duel of man's will and woman's won't.

Miss Darnell, who can be a temptress without even trying, has never shown so strikingly that she can be an actress as well. But, in a picture crowded with skilled performances--by Kirk Douglas, Miss Sothern, and Thelma Ritter as an aggressively democratic maid-of-all-work--Paul Douglas' spaniel-faced portrait of a tough guy stands by itself.

In 1946 Playwright-Director Garson Kanin was looking for an actor to play the roughneck lead in his Broadway comedy, Born Yesterday. What he had in mind was someone along the craggy lines of a jowly, broad-shouldered radio announcer he had known back in the days when he was writing soap operas. ". . . You know," he would impatiently finger-snap, "a Paul Douglas type--but an actor." Unable to find a reasonable facsimile, he finally hired the real thing: Paul Douglas. It was a happy piece of casting; Douglas turned out to be as big a hit as Born Yesterday.

As an actor, Douglas was born only yesterday. For all but the last three of his 41 years he had been practically everything else--including fast shuffles as a lifeguard, paint salesman and professional football player. His first radio job was as an announcer on Philadelphia's WCAU, a $55-a-week steppingstone to a far fatter income as a sports and special-events broadcaster.

For the last two years moviemakers have been trying to lure Douglas away from Broadway, but he refused their long-term contracts. During his first few scenes in A Letter he suffered all the shakes and quivers of opening night. When the movie was completed he took a deep breath and signed a seven-year contract.

Siren of Atlantis (United Artists) may bring a moment of comfort to romantics who believe in the lost continent of Atlantis. It seems that the continent can be found this year somewhere near the Sahara Desert, within easy camel lope of a Foreign Legion post. Atlantis turns out to be populated by a carefree tribe whose principal activities are beating the tom-tom, drinking large quantities of a potent juice called arrack, and ogling the dancing girls. In their more solemn moments, they sometimes pause to embalm unwelcome visitors in molten gold.

The big wheel in this novel civilization is a slinky siren named Antinea (Maria Montez). When a couple of the Foreign Legion boys (Jean Pierre Aumont and Dennis O'Keefe) blunder into her boudoir cooking for a missing French archeologist (he shows up eventually, tidily gold-leafed in the Visitors' Gallery), she plays them off against each other. Then she plays both off against the old embalming fluid.

Strong men go mad over the lush Antinea, which is a great mistake. Under her spell, Legionnaire Aumont kills his pal in a fit of jealousy. When he in turn gets buried in a sandstorm, Antinea is left to a pulsating game of chess with the household embalmer, whose tongue has been cut out--because he talked out of turn. For determined viewers who stick it out to the very end, the newsreel may still save the day.

Whiplash (Warner). The hero of this gory battle royal (Dane Clark) gets tagged on the jaw, slugged with a blackjack, kicked in the head and punched orie-eyed in a boxing bout. Since most of this mauling is done by thugs who work for the husband of his beautiful, frozen-faced girl (Alexis Smith), poor dear Dane suffers without a whimper. Toward the end, there is some talk of sending him off to a hospital to have his head examined--an idea which might have saved a lot of trouble earlier in the story.

While the producers of Whiplash seem chiefly interested in illustrating the varied arts of mayhem, they were not able to resist dragging in a little Moral Problem. Clark, the human punching bag, is getting the treatment because he wants to rescue Alexis from her sinister mate (Zachary Scott) and retire from bad fights to paint bad pictures. The catch is that the wicked husband is paralyzed from the waist down, and thinks up his villainies in a wheelchair. No hero can sock a man in a wheelchair; no heroine can divorce him. How to get rid of him? Whiplash solves the problem in characteristically brisk and brutal fashion by having him mashed to a pulp, wheelchair & all, by a taxi.

One Sunday Afternoon (Warner) is an old story with its face lifted for the third time.* At this point, it wears a starchy mask, and its smiles creak painfully. It is an idyl of the Gay Nineties, and the costumes have a bustley charm; but the girls who wear them are addicted to Technicolor simpers. The love stories of the two young couples (Dennis Morgan and Dorothy Malone, Don DeFore and Janis Paige) reach a high point when they go for a spin in the park in a horseless carriage--a singularly low-voltage form of sparking. Not much else happens to them except that they pair off and get married. One lad goes to jail for a short stretch, while the other becomes an alderman. It seems likely that the jailbird gets the best of the deal.

Ralph Blane's nostalgic melodies and Ben Blue's old-fashioned but highly polished comedy are the main assets of this remake. The others are Newcomer Dorothy Malone's winsome singing and the earnest performance of Dennis Morgan.

*The James Hagan play opened on Broadway in 1933. Paramount filmed the story the same year with Gary Cooper. In 1941 the first Warner Bros, version, called The Strawberry Blonde, starred James Cagney, Rita Hayworth and Olivia de Havilland.

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