The New Pictures

Criss Cross (Universal International] is fairly routine gangster melodrama in which the hero (Burt Lancaster) is led into a whole mess of trouble by his alluring ex-wife (Yvonne de Carlo). But it is sharply directed by Robert Siodmak and enlivened with some fresh bits of business. Samples: a jug-nursing old gentleman (Alan Napier) who makes a specialty of planning complex holdups; the robbery of an armored car (in which Lancaster is a guard), a rare sport among real-life or cinema crooks; so much double-crossing that the cast almost needs military maps to remind them who is on whose side at any given moment.

Criss Cross is further brightened by some excellent supporting performances. The best are Stephen McNally's detective, Dan Duryea as a sarcastic thug who seems to have more common sense than anyone else in the cast, and Tom Pedi as a fat, greedy hoodlum who bubbles "That's the ticket, that's the ticket," while the mob is planning some program of frightfulness against honest citizens. As the criss-crossed lovers, Lancaster and De Carlo steadily plug the reliable old theme of all-for-love-and-the-world-well-lost. Audiences are not very likely to be convinced that their particular world was much to lose.

Cover Up (United Artists) is a doubtful little melodrama with a doubtful moral thesis: murder is excusable when the victim is an unpopular curmudgeon. The film's makers avoid an out & out tussle with the Johnston Office by killing off the murderer, a kindly old doctor, before Insurance Investigator Dennis O'Keefe can catch up with him. But, preoccupied with Dennis' courtship of a suspect's daughter (Barbara Britton), they blithely overlook the fact that a local banker was an accessory to murder and that Sheriff William Bendix shut his eyes to the crime. The rather whimsical reward for all this tampering with justice: Dennis gets the girl.

A Woman's Secret (RKO Radio) might better have been kept under lock & key. Producer Herman J. Mankiewicz, a veteran scripter who should have known setter, scraped this one right off the bottom of Vicki Baum's rhinestone-studded jarrel of slick fiction.

The story is about a Tin Pan Alley tunesmith (Melvyn Douglas) who gets caught in some badly directed crossfire between two Manhattan songbirds (Maureen O'Hara and Gloria Grahame). When Maureen suddenly loses her voice, she and Douglas discover Gloria, a seductive salesgirl with a gold-plated larynx. Under their high-pressure salesmanship, Gloria's voice soon belongs to a radio network, a gilded Manhattan nightclub and the admiring U.S. public. But Gloria is not easy to manage. She is finally the victim of a shooting scrape that lands Maureen in the clink and then in a fadeout clinch with Douglas. It is never made entirely clear what all the shooting is about.

This indigestible lump of melodrama is leavened now & again by a stretch of slapstick which is equally unreal. The only real moments, in fact, are provided by Gloria Grahame, who proves once again, as she did by her performance as the sullen taxi dancer in Crossfire, that she can be one of Hollywood's most convincing chippies.

My Own True Love (Paramount) is a sincere but woebegone Hollywood attempt to produce a British specialty: the quiet little drama in which well-bred characters stiff-upperlip their way through an emotional crisis.

A London widower (Melvyn Douglas) falls in love with a sympathetic, war-weary A.T.S. girl (Phyllis Calvert). His son (Philip Friend), missing in action for several years, turns up wounded, bitter and a virtual stranger to the father. Son turns for understanding--and eventually for love--to father's fiancee. Before father can marry the girl, everyone gets into such a self-sacrificial mood that son's postwar maladjustment dissipates itself in noble dialogue.

To help tell this somber story, Paramount has used the services of a good British director, Compton Bennett (The Seventh Veil), a charming, able British star, Miss Calvert, and some competent British supporting players. The result is nonetheless a poor counterfeit of the genuine product. My Own True Love lacks the virtues of the best British movies (subtle human detail, glints of gentle humor, authentic backgrounds), but it has the faults of being talky, stodgy and intolerably slow.

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