The New Pictures

Command Decision (MGM) was a Broadway hit play chiefly because of some brainy, brawny dialogue and Paul Kelly's skilled performance as Brigadier General K. C. ("Casey") Dennis, commanding a heavy bombardment division in England. In the movie, some of the sharp edges have been knocked off the dialogue by the censors, and, in the hands of Clark Gable, General Dennis has become a less forceful figure. The picture gets its chief vitality from Walter Pidgeon's vivid playing of cynical old Major General Kane.

Gable has one strong scene in which he "talks down" a navigator who is trying to land a pilotless bomber. Significantly, this is the movie's one big outdoor sequence. Back inside headquarters, where drama depends on the reading of lines, Cinemactor Gable cannot always hold the center of the stage.

Command Decision largely ignores the men who handled the planes, although most of the film's emotional sock is in the bit parts of the men who flew missions, well played by John Hodiak, Cameron Mitchell, Marshall Thompson and Michael Steele. Like the play and the book before it, the movie makes out a sympathetic case for the desk-bound generals and echoes Novelist-War Correspondent Ernest Hemingway's observation that generals are good people.

The Accused (Hal Wallis; Paramount) is the story of a pretty Ph.D. (Loretta Young) who commits a murder in self-defense, and then almost falls in love with the detective (Wendell Corey) who is trying to pin the crime on her. The fact that Loretta is a professor of psychology, and thus knows about guilt complexes, does not make her terrified attempts at concealment any easier.

The plot--essentially a fast, exciting chase with psychological overtones--gives Loretta Young a chance to play a menaced heroine, a role that she does with high skill. Will murder out? Will the beautiful professor be mangled in the coils of her own guilt--or will she be stalked down by the smart, relentless detective? Her only escape seems to be offered by a handsome young lawyer (Robert Cummings) who loves her even when he begins to doubt her innocence. But Loretta is as thoroughly fascinated by the strategy of her accuser as she is by the fond advice of counsel.

The Accused is well constructed, well acted and less weighted with hokum than most psychological thrillers. It common-sensically concedes that a smart cop who knows crimes and criminals could outwit an equally smart psychologist who doesn't. As the cop, Wendell Corey, a comparative newcomer from Broadway, not only steals scenes from Movie Veterans Young and Cummings, but also makes the semi-villain so real and likable that audiences may feel the heroine has won the second-best man.

So Dear to My Heart (Walt Disney; RKO Radio), a sugary version of Sterling North's novel about an Indiana backwoods boyhood, is short on realism but long on entertainment. Jeremiah (Bobby Driscoll) and his little black lamb are good for a few laughs and tears, but the story is mainly useful as an excuse for Burl Ives's ballads and Walt Disney's cartoons.

Fortunately, the cartoons and live action are kept separated, but there are moments when Disney appears to be matching his studio-made folk songs (the best are Stick-To-It-Ivity and It's Whatcha Do With Whatcha Got) against Burl's classic Billy Boy and Sourwood Mountain. Since a fair portion of Disney may someday become U.S. folklore, this idea is neither pretentious nor uninteresting.

Bobby Driscoll is a rarity among child actors: when relaxed, he is an attractive kid, and when called upon to act, he is not at all repellent. His battle to save his black sheep from the meat block and get it to the county fair might have become moderately tiresome, except for timely interruptions for ballad and cartoon sequences. Beulah Bondi, a Bible-quoting grandmother, and the late Harry Carey, as a kindly farmer, fit almost perfectly into the Hollywood concept of uppercrust hillbillydom.

Chicken Every Sunday (20th Century-Fox) might look pretty foolish if it were set in modern times, but as a turn-of-the-century fable it seems plausible enough. The hero (Dan Dailey) is a rainbow-chaser--a dreamer, a promoter, an incurable gambler. He is the type who insists on financing a hospital in a small Arizona town because his wife (Celeste Holm) is expecting her first baby, but he is also ready to gamble their home against the long chance that he will bring in a copper mine. Dailey will take a flyer on anything, but once an enterprise is established, it always slips through his fingers.

As a hedge against his blue-sky antics, his cagey wife runs a boardinghouse. Thus, Chicken Every Sunday is crowded with a rich, hot-biscuits-&-gravy atmosphere and some folksy characters. When Dailey's last fling (the coppermine gamble) almost gets the whole crew thrown into the street, the moral emerges: How can a man be a failure if he makes a lot of friends, wins the love of his wife and children and even the respect of his boarders?

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