The New Pictures

The Bribe (MGM) puts Robert Taylor to work at one of Hollywood's most dog-eared formulas: U.S. Government agent falls for girl, finds she is innocent wife (or sister) of crook he is out to get. It always winds up with the hero facing both guns and a moral dilemma.

In The Bribe, dame and dilemma are beautifully embodied (but hardly acted) by Ava Gardner, wife of a derelict U.S. flyer (John Hodiak). When not hung over from bad rum and alleged combat fatigue, Hodiak is busy smuggling airplane engines to Central America with the help of a suave mastermind (Vincent Price) and a broken-down fingerman (Charles Laughton). Fed-Man Taylor finally convinces himself, with some hard-breathing monologuing, that Ava is innocent but deeply implicated. So why not sell out on his job and collect on his love--as well as on Laughton's $12,000 in hush money?

From there on, complications and cliches roll up like thunderheads around a low-pressure area. After some improbable, fast moving action, including a running gunfight through a Central American fiesta, Taylor gets his three men, as well as Ava, and salvages a little tarnished honor.

Nobody in The Bribe seems to be having much fun at it except Laughton, who appears to relish his juicy cut of ham. There is a brilliant display of fiesta fireworks and a convincingly real sequence of deep-sea fishing (Taylor v. a handsome spiked marlin). For those who enjoy Laughton, fireworks, or big-game fishing, The Bribe may be worth a look.

The Three Godfathers (Argosy; M-G-M), made by independent producers, is the work of such talented people as Director John Ford (The Informer, The Long Voyage Home), Producer Merian C. Cooper (The Long Voyage Home, Fort Apache) and Scripters Laurence Stallings (What Price Glory) and Frank S. Nugent (Fort Apache). The finished product gives the viewer the kind of shock he might get from seeing all the Flying Wallendas fall off the high wire at once. Godfathers is close to being an unintentional parody on the old-fashioned western.

Director Ford was apparently trying to develop a muscular yarn about the effect of innocence and helplessness on man's wickedness. Three escaping bank bandits, in Technicolor, stumble across a woman in childbirth, stranded in a covered wagon during a sandstorm. The crooks, all 15-minute eggs, immediately begin quaking with spasms of oldtime religion, secondhand paternal pride and firsthand conscience. One of the godfathers (Harry Carey Jr.) dies from exhaustion and a slight wound he picked up in the robbery. Another (Pedro Armendariz) breaks a leg and has to shoot himself. That leaves John Wayne and Baby; Mother has been decently buried after a mawkish death scene.

Wayne is so purified by all this experience of birth and death that he takes Baby and heads for the saloon at New Jerusalem. There, as he knows he must, he meets the stern but just sheriff, a short jail term, and, of course, the banker's daughter--who seems willing to wait for him. The sheriff (Ward Bond) gets temporary custody of Baby, a foresighted arrangement, since with all the sentiment lavished on him, the tot is clearly going to grow up to be a very tough citizen.

The Lucky Stiff (Amusement Enterprises; United Artists) features that rather shady lawyer-detective named John J. Malone who figures prominently in a number of Craig Rice whodunits. It is also the not-too-promising debut of radio's Jack Benny as a movie producer (and financial backer).

Rye-drinking Lawyer Malone (Brian Donlevy) wriggles into trouble and out again with monotonous regularity. For a while, he divides his time between a nightclub crooner (Dorothy Lamour) and a rich, fusty old client (Marjorie Rambeau). Then the crooner is convicted of murdering her boss. When she is supposedly executed (but actually spared by the governor), Donlevy gets a chance to put all his troubles under one roof: he moves beautiful Miss Lamour into the house with the old lady.

With a fair amount of restraint for a mystery-comedy, The Lucky Stiff confines itself to only four murders. It could stand a few more laughs. Even its romance dwindles off when Lawyer Donlevy decides to ration the women in his life. He gives up Lamour, but holds on to both Client Rambeau (whose fees pay a lot of bills), and his long-suffering secretary (Claire Trevor) who tells him which bills must be paid.

John Loves Mary (Warner), As a play, this farce about a returning veteran's muddled love life displayed a juggler's talent for keeping shiny bubbles in the air for three acts. Less expert movie treatment punctures them in the first reel.

John (Ronald Reagan) comes back from years in Europe to marry pining Mary (Patricia Neal). He is slightly handicapped because he has already entered a token marriage with an English girl--only to get her into the U.S. so that she can marry her long-lost love and John's old buddy (Jack Carson). The handicap gets heavy--and the film heavy-handed--when it turns out that Carson has already married someone else.

The picture's chief blunder is the miscasting of Patricia Neal, an able young Broadway actress whose throaty, stagy intensity in this featherweight role suggests a tigress in a cat show.

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