The New Pictures

The Damned Don't Cry (Warner), but Joan Crawford does, in this true-confession-type story of a woman's sinful progress from hard times to easy virtue. First, like many of her fans, she is a shiny-nosed household drudge, bored and burdened with a husband who doesn't understand her. Escaping rebelliously, she becomes a cynical tart with a burlesque strut. Finally, having double-crossed her way onto the lap of an underworld titan, she acquires all the graces of a society matron. Along the way, Joan proves the undoing of four tall, handsome men, including Kent Smith, an honest but weak accountant, and David Brian, a pseudo-respectable gangland big shot with a taste for Etruscan vases.

Written with some pungent dialogue and played as if it really mattered, the movie manages to keep its hokum fairly lively. Joan's fans will be glad to find that, for all her suffering, the wages of sin never loom quite as large as the dividends. They may also glean some thrill from the script's implied message: a woman's decision to walk out on a grubby home and poor provider is virtually an inalienable right.

Love Happy (United Artists) is a Marx Brothers comedy with too little of Groucho's irreverent wit and too much of Chico's irrelevant Italianate chatter. It gets most of its laughs from a welcome abundance of Harpo's funniest clowning in years.

As in most Marx movies, all that matters is enough nonsense to take the curse off such inevitable interruptions as Chico's piano solo, Harpo's turn at the harp, the romantic subplot and the musical production routines. As the author of Love Happy's basic story, Harpo has treated himself to some bright comic ideas and a wealth of sight gags, some of which seem to have improved with time.

For Harpo's fans, at least two sequences should be enough to make the barren patches endurable. In one, the zany mute tramp leads three villains in a chase across the mid-Manhattan skyline, capering in & out of huge electric advertising displays that are ingeniously rigged to help him elude pursuit. The other sequence makes him the prisoner of international jewel thieves headed by Ilona Massey, whose decolletage plunges low enough to give even Hollywood a touch of the bends.

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