The New Pictures

Mister 880 (20th Century-Fox) adapts the authentic story--almost too good to be true--of the most elusive man the U.S. Secret Service ever tried to catch: a lovable old counterfeiter who struck off amateurish one-dollar bills. St. Clair McKelway told the story in three New Yorker articles last year. Scripter Robert (It Happened One Night) Riskin retells it with just enough respect for the flavorsome facts and just the right knack of working them into warm, humorous fiction.

As in real life, the counterfeiter (Edmund Gwenn) confounds and frustrates the Treasury Department for ten years. Dubbed "Old 880" after the number on his bulging Secret Service file, he is a mild little Manhattan junkman, fond of dogs, children and his fellow man. While the T-men break up big counterfeiting rings, he goes blandly on passing his outrageously crude singles. He prints only about 50 a month, barely enough to keep him and his dog shabbily independent. His benign (and shrewd) policy: no more than one to a customer. When the agents finally nab him, they are wholly disarmed--and frustrated all over again--by his gentle air and toothless, guiltless grin.

Shaped by less adroit hands, the movie's inevitable love interest might have proved a stumbling block; instead, it gives the story a lift. One of Gwenn's friendly neighbors, U.N. Translator Dorothy McGuire, inadvertently receives and passes some of the queer, thus catches the eye of T-man Burt Lancaster. Eager to prolong his attentions, she reads up on counterfeiting and begins spouting counterfeiter's argot. This maneuver sets up a clever scene in which Lancaster gives her a whispered grilling at a nightclub table while wandering violinists serenade them with romantic mood music. The romance also serves the script's ironic purpose of bringing the Secret Service man innocently into the counterfeiter's happy circle of friends.

But the script's neatest trick, unfalteringly pulled off by Edmund Goulding's direction and Edmund Gwenn's superb acting, is to give the picture's closing episodes the winning quality of Miracle on 34th Street. Like Miracle, in which Actor Gwenn played a put-upon Santa Claus, Mister 880 works up the surefire comic-sentimental appeal of pompous authority melting in the warmth of an ingenuous little man of good will.

The Glass Menagerie (Warner), the first Tennessee Williams play to reach Broadway, is also the first to reach the screen.* It does not live up to its stage success. Except for an "upbeat" ending, which Co-Scripter Williams reluctantly imposed on Playwright Williams at the urging of Hollywood, the film gives a reasonably faithful reading of the play. Painstakingly produced and expensively cast, it tries conscientiously to rework the frail story in movie terms. But the charm, the magic and the vague sadness of the play are lost.

Hollywood's major error may well lie in the effort to make the transfer at all. On the stage, Menagerie's human, uneventful little story was spun out like a dream in short, fragmentary scenes. Williams himself noted that it was "a memory play . . . dimly lighted . . . not realistic," and Broadway's highly stylized production caught the mood with music, transparent curtains, and shifting light and color.

To keep that spirit in the movie might have meant risking the pitfall of avant garde hocuspocus. Instead, Co-Producers

Jerry Wald and Charles K. Feldman have welded the play's fragments into a literal, realistic continuity, with only a gesture or two in the direction of the original atmosphere. As a result, the story's poignancy and humor are all but swallowed up in a drab, tedious film that even a set of good characterizations cannot redeem.

Menagerie is the reminiscence of a merchant seaman (Arthur Kennedy) about his life with mother (Gertrude Lawrence) and sister (Jane Wyman) in a shabby St. Louis flat across the alley from a dance hall. Mother, a onetime Southern belle long ago deserted by her husband, is a flibbertigibbet who clings to her airs of gentility, her magnolia-scented memories and a fierce desire to find a husband for her crippled, pathologically shy daughter.

Endlessly she nags her son, a dreamer trapped in a shipping clerk's job, to bring "a gentleman caller" to the house. At length he brings a warehouse co-worker (Kirk Douglas), an ambitious self-improver, glib, personable and halfsincere. Putting the best face on an uneasy situation, Douglas enchants the girl with compliments, a dance, a kiss. Then he dashes her by owning up to a fiancee and making an awkward exit.

At that point, the play ends with the girl and her mother crushed and hopeless, the son ready to follow his dreams into the merchant marine. In the movie, the visitor's line of guff, heavily larded with Dale Carnegie psychology, brings the girl out of her cocoon, eager to greet another gentleman caller who comes up the stairs at the upbeat fadeout.

Apart from the changed format and the tampered ending, the movie suffers a letdown in British Actress Gertrude Lawrence's performance. She does a competent job, marred by some confusion of accents, and her versatility enables her to flit coquettishly through a soft-focus flashback recounting the fancied conquests of her youth. Yet she never gives the role the emotional tug or the full measure of addled humor that it had in the hands of the stage's late great Laurette Taylor.

Jane Wyman in a blonde wig also realizes only a fraction of the pathetic character she plays. Actors Kennedy and Douglas give polished performances, but they swim against the tide.

*Now in production: A Streetcar Named Desire, under the direction of Elia Kazan, who staged it on Broadway.

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