The New Pictures

The White Tower (RKO Radio] is a mythical Swiss Alp, so high and treacherous that no climber has ever reached the top. Created by James Ramsey Ullman in his 1945 bestselling novel and recreated in Technicolor on Alpine locations, it is the setting of a carefully rigged story about six climbers who try.

The climb is encumbered with a heavy load of symbolism. The mountain itself symbolizes Life, and each member of the climbing party is tagged with a different nationality and a different motive for climbing, i.e., for living. The climbers: a warmhearted Italian girl (Valli), a war-weary American (Glenn Ford), an unreconstructed Nazi (Lloyd Bridges), a decadent Frenchman (Claude Rains), a philosophical Englishman (Sir Cedric Hardwicke), a dutiful Swiss (Oscar Homolka). Before the peak comes into sight, they revert pretty much to national typecasting, and the plot maneuvers them to illustrate some simple homilies (e.g., Love conquers all; United we stand, divided we fall).

As allegory, The White Tower makes a molehill out of the mountain, but at face value, it is a superior adventure film, full of awesome scenery and the photogenic excitement of mountain climbing. Against backdrops of fog, a blizzard and glaring snowscapes, Director Ted (The Window) Teztlaff skillfully conveys not only the hairbreadth perils and sheer exertion of the sport, but also a fair idea of its tricky techniques. A buxom, wind-blown Valli, with talent to match her good looks, helps to keep the Alpine vistas from stealing the picture.

The Secret Fury (RKO Radio) plunges Claudette Colbert, Robert Ryan and some equally able supporting players neck-deep into the kind of cinematic nonsense that has turned a lot of moviegoers into television fans.

Claudette's wedding to Ryan is halted by a stranger who announces that she is already married. This is news to her, but it seems to be borne out by a marriage license and a cloud of witnesses. Ryan sticks loyally by, knowing that these things have a way of working themselves out. When Claudette tracks down her supposed husband, a gun goes off behind a closed door, and she is found alone with his corpse. Tried for murder, she is committed to a mental institution in a sequence that looks something like a screen test for The Snake Pit.

With the groundwork laid for schizophrenia, or at feast amnesia, the plot switches to Gaslight: Claudette, it turns out, is the victim of an elaborate frame-up. After using a lot of fancy psychiatric jargon in analyzing the heroine's condition, the script finally reveals the villain as melodrama's oldfashioned "mad fiend." Still unsolved: Who framed Actress Colbert into the role?

The Gunfighter (20th Century-Fox) is a maverick western: it spends most of its time indoors. Its hero (Gregory Peck) is a celebrated desperado who wants to go straight. With a limited amount of gunfire and hard riding, the movie makes every shot count, manages to fill a barroom interior with more suspense than most horse operas get from all outdoors.

Outlaw Peck has the fastest draw in the West and a dozen killings to prove it; but at 35 he is worn, broke and hankering to live out his days peaceably with his estranged wife and son. He rides into a town behind the frontier to find them. To avoid trouble, he coops himself up in a saloon on a quiet morning while the friendly sheriff (Millard Mitchell), an ex-crony, goes to fetch his wife (Helen Westcott). As Peck waits, trouble seeks him out: a fanatic is gunning for him to avenge a murder he never committed; three brothers of his latest victim are moving in for their own revenge; a cocky young loafer is itching to win glory by beating him to the draw.

The plot closes in inexorably, always pointing up the tantalizing question of just how & when Peck will die. By concentrating the action largely in one place and within a few hours, Director Henry King gets considerable tension while generally avoiding the risk that things may get somewhat static for a movie.

The film also offers some tangy humor, able performances (notably by Actors Peck and Mitchell) and a sense of period and locale, right down to Peck's droopy mustache. But, like its outlaw hero, it comes to a bad end. Its plausible air lasts until the final scenes; then the hero goes out of character and the picture goes off on a little sentimental jag to treat him like a tin god.

Crisis (M-G-M). What should a skilled U.S. brain surgeon do if he is the only man who can save the life of a hated foreign dictator? After posing the doctor's dilemma and making it count for some good scenes, Writer-Director Richard

Brooks founders in melodramatic bunk and never reaches a dramatically satisfying solution.

Surgeon Gary Grant, vacationing with his wife (Paula Raymond) in a Latin American country on the brink of revolution, suddenly finds himself a prisoner of the ailing dictator (well played by Jose Ferrer) who is dying of a brain tumor. While Dr. Grant ponders whether to operate, revolutionists urge him to let the scalpel slip, and Ferrer offers some glib justifications of dictatorship.

For all its democracy v. dictatorship argument, the picture seems to take place in a political vacuum. Its revolutionary mob scenes are too studied, and its attempt to have a single guitar carry the musical score (in imitation of The Third Man's zither) produces nondescript results. Yet, as his first directing effort, it shows promise for Novelist Brooks (The Brick Foxhole). Best scene: the condescending dictator and his friends turning squeamish as they watch Grant in a dress rehearsal of the brain operation.

Please Believe Me (MGM) has the kind of plot that has given musicomedy books a bad name for years. Since this is not a musicomedy but a screwball farce, the series of studiously rigged romantic misunderstandings is even harder to take. Three suitors (Peter Lawford, Robert Walker, Mark Stevens) scramble for the hand of an improvident heiress (Deborah Kerr). There are some fleeting laughs, Heroine Kerr's natural charm and a fairly amusing performance by Actor Lawford, but what the picture badly lacks is songs, dances and a lot of rewriting on the road.

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