The New Pictures

Roseanna McCoy (Samuel Goldwyn; RKO Radio). In all its years of mining movies out of the trigger-happy hills of U.S. history and legend, Hollywood had somehow never hit on the famous feud of the West Virginia Hatfields and the Kentucky McCoys. With Roseanna McCoy, Producer Sam Goldwyn and Director Irving (Enchantment) Reis have made good the oversight. The result is primarily a story of young love, more pastoral than pugnacious.

As Roseanna opens, all is quiet on the Hatfield-McCoy front. Over in West Virginia, the hot-tempered, hard-drinking Hatfields are helling about after bear and possum in their own backyard. On the Kentucky side of the Big Sandy River, the hard-working McCoys are peaceably tending their taters and corn. But the armistice is not to last. When young Johnse Hatfield (Farley Granger) falls in love with Roseanna McCoy (Joan Evans) and carries her off to be his bride, hell breaks loose on the border. In no time at all, every Hatfield in the hills is blazing away at the nearest McCoy.

Though far too romantic to be the real McCoy, Roseanna is a moderately entertaining movie. It successfully avoids the bearded cliches of most hillbilly fiction and sticks to a safe middle road between authenticated history and conservative Hollywood tradition. Highlight of the picture is Miss Evans, Sam Goldwyn's latest personal find, whose natural, unadorned charm gives an appealing homespun finish to the slick production. To back her up, Goldwyn also contributed the talents of some distinguished veterans, notably Raymond Massey and Aline MacMahon as the elder McCoys, and Charles Bickford and Hope Emerson as Anse and Levisa Hatfield. Their performances, together with that of Miss Evans, give the picture a sober solidity which, in the end, carries more genuine dramatic punch than its brawling romanticism.

The Girl In the Painting (Rank; Universal-International) begins with a mere dab of an idea. A British major (Guy Rolfe), dropping in at a London exhibition of wartime paintings, falls in love with a portrait of "Hildegard" (Mai Zetterling), a beautiful displaced blonde, and determines to find her. In the course of ransacking D.P. camps in occupied Germany, he meets not only Hildegard but a sinister, disguised SS general.

The crisp moviemaking that follows is the work of Producer Anthony (Quartet) Darnborough and Director Terence Fisher. Taking a loosely knit story, they have tightened it stitch by stitch with skillful timing, intelligent camera work and imaginative sound effects to produce a superior suspense film. Most suspenseful sequence: the SS general slowly stalking a victim in a twilight forest while the sound track listens with hair-raising patience to the chirp of crickets, a night bird, and the final telltale crack of a breaking twig.

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