The New Pictures

South of St. Louis (Warner) actually takes place just north of the Rio Grande. A Technicolored western, masquerading in fits & starts as a chunk of Civil War history, it has a doubleheader love story and a hydra-headed plot.

The three Confederate-loving buckaroos who keep things moving are Joel McCrea, Zachary Scott and Douglas Kennedy, owners of the Three Bell Ranch. The complicated action is sped up--as well as made more complicated--by cattle-rustling Victor Jory who, working as a Union Army guerrilla fighter, steals their cattle, burns down their ranch, and starts cutting in on their gunrunning racket.

The script leaves little room for love interest. Dorothy Malone, who ends up marrying Kennedy, hardly gets past the threshold of the plot. But Alexis Smith, as a sultry barroom singer with her lids at half-mast and her lips provocatively ajar, weaves more prominently in & out of the all-male hubbub. Eventually, her shady morals and mascara notwithstanding, she becomes the wife of Rancher McCrea. The highly involved plot in South of St. Louis, always pretty implausible, moves along at a fast enough clip to look convincing, and most of the principals are old enough hands at this sort of thing to take the handicaps and hurdles without breaking their easy canter.

No Minor Vices (Enterprise; MGM) is a major indiscretion employing three able stars directed by Lewis (All Quiet on the Western Front) Milestone. It is a painfully misconceived attempt to stretch out and puff up a frail piece of whimsy into a frothy comedy.

Anything but frothy and rarely funny, the film turns a gay dog of an artist (Louis Jourdan) loose in the happy home of a stuffy, successful pediatrician (Dana Andrews) and his wife-receptionist (Lilli Palmer). Stung by the doctor's smug criticism of his art, the tempestuous painter cuts him down to size by trying--almost successfully--to break up his marriage. In the process, the picture tries--and always fails--to palm off drivel as drollery. Sample: a long, witless sequence in which the artist weeps for some lobsters that are boiled alive for the doctor's dinner.

Asia's New Voice (MARCH OF TIME) is a moving window opening on one of the great upheavals of modern history. It takes a quick look at the sweep of events in India since the war: the withdrawal of the British, the vast subcontinental explosion of violence and civil war, the locust-like migrations of terrified millions, and, like the crack of a pistol in a crowded room, the assassination of Gandhi.

The camera spares India neither praise nor blame. It takes a passing glance at the high, cool beauties of Kashmir, the shaded Western luxuries of India's rich, and the dark, woebegone face of an Indian waif circled by three buzzing flies. It watches a family of Untouchables eating a nameless dirty mush, then joins a poor but caste-proud Brahman for a chaste meal of fruit and vegetables, arranged, as elegantly as a still-life painting, on a large plantain leaf.

Most startling, perhaps, for U.S. moviegoers are the shots of India's modern commerce and industry: the streamlined tentacles of Air-India operating over 6,000 miles of airways; its vast, nationalized (but hardly modernized) railroad system, fourth largest in the world; the radio station at New Delhi, looking like a maharaja's palace; and its huge cotton mills. The film is cut and paced to make forcefully clear the disorder and vitality, the sloth and aspiration of an ancient country in the process of becoming a modern nation.

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