The New Pictures

The Furies (Paramount) is a pretentious exercise in Freudian dramatics, set in the New Mexico cow country of 1870. Its main characters, driven by vengeance and greed, wear their passions as openly as their six-shooters. And they switch from hate to love, and from love to hate, as readily as they shift from a canter to a trot.

Based on a novel by Niven (Duel in the Sun) Busch, the movie tells the story of a headstrong filly (Barbara Stanwyck) with a father fixation. The old man (the late Walter Huston) is a ripsnorting, tyrannical cattle baron who is so absolute a local sovereign that he even prints his own money. When Huston imports a Washington society matron (Judith Anderson) whom he plans to marry, Barbara works herself up to hurling a pair of scissors at the intruder's face. Banished for her impulsiveness, Barbara plots to wreck Huston and seize his domain. She recruits help from another man she hates (because he once scorned her love): a gambler (Wendell Corey) who hates her father, too.

These large, economy-size emotions are packaged in purple dialogue and strenuously oversold by Director Anthony (Winchester '73) Mann. To satisfy his enthusiasm for arty, heavily filtered photography, virtually all the outdoor scenes take place in the murky half-light of dawn or dusk, to the point where the movie seems to suggest that the sun never really shone in the old Southwest. Except for a gusty, artful performance by Actor Huston--the last before his death in April--The Furies is notable only as a sample of what Zane Grey might have done if he had tried to write like Eugene O'Neill.

No Way Out (20th Century-Fox) is a Negro-problem picture. A late starter--the first of its kind came out a year ago--it is good enough to overcome that handicap. It may not be the best of its lot, but it is undoubtedly the most outspoken and pertinent. Its message flows straight out of the action, and as a piece of entertainment it is a tense, explosive melodrama.

Produced by 20th Century-Fox Studio Boss Darryl Zanuck, who made Pinky, the movie does not deal with the Negro in the Deep South (Intruder in the Dust) or in the isolated South Pacific (Home of the Brave), or with the specialized problem of the Negro trying to pass as white (Lost Boundaries). The story comes directly to grips with racial prejudice in what is presumably an enlightened area of the U.S.: a big city north of the Mason-Dixon line.

No Way Out is the story of a Negro intern (Sidney Poitier) who tries and fails to save the life of a white patient in a county hospital. When the patient dies, his brother (Richard Widmark), a thief and pathological Negro-hater, refuses to permit an autopsy that might vindicate the doctor. Himself a patient in the hospital, Widmark baits Poitier mercilessly, dupes the dead man's ex-wife (Linda Darnell) into igniting a race riot. Poitier, who gets the nasty job of treating the riot's white victims, finally forces an autopsy by falsely confessing to the patient's murder.

Racial tensions have now been pictured on the screen frequently enough to have lost some of their novelty. Writer-Director Joseph L. Mankiewicz and co-Scripter Lesser Samuels make up for that with sensational incidents (e.g., a woman spits in the Negro doctor's face) and dialogue strewn with virtually every known epithet for Negroes. They draw the line at showing much of the race riot--in which the Negroes ambush and demolish the mob that plans to attack them--but the detailed scenes leading up to it are charged with venom.

At the end, the melodrama gets out of hand. And, like most films of its kind, the picture stacks its cards too obviously in the Negro's favor. Most of its characters are oversimplified blacks and whites. (One exception: the bitter woman, well played by Actress Darnell in a slattern's makeup, who gets over her prejudice against Negroes.)

But the movie does an effective job of conveying the helplessness of its hero against unreasoning hatred, the hypersensitive suspicion of some of his fellow Negroes, and the poverty, ignorance and insecurity that goad their tormentors. A well-written exchange between the hospital's chief doctor (Stephen McNally) and its administrative head (Stanley Ridges) shows pointedly how social expediency can hobble the best intentions of intelligent men in decisions involving Negroes. Standouts in an excellent cast: the likable Poitier, a savagely villainous Widmark, and Broadway's Mildred Joanne Smith who, as the hero's wife, gives the movie some of its most touching scenes.

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