The New Pictures

Trio (Gainsborough; Paramount) is a second helping of Somerset Maugham short stories, put together on the successful recipe of last year's Quartet (TIME, Feb. 21, 1949). Like its predecessor, the new British film reflects Author Maugham's gentle but persuasive art of storytelling, his gift for irony, his alertness to minor human crises in small events, and his British wariness of emotional excess in big ones.

As in Quartet, Maugham himself greets the audience with a foreword. This time he urbanely introduces each of the three stories as well. He also has a somewhat greater stake in them, because he worked on Trio's screenplay with Scripter R. C. (Odd Man Out, Quartet) Sherriff and Playwright Noel (Edward, My Son) Langley. For stories that are slight, less suited to the cinema than to the library shelf, and of unequal quality, they make up an entertaining movie.

The first piece, The Verger, boils down to a whimsical three-line joke; the second, Mr. Knowall, is a simple little anecdote with a Maugham snapper. Spun out with an unerring sense of just what the traffic will bear, both are delightful. In the first, an elderly church attendant (ably played by James Hayter) loses his 17-year-old job when a prissy new vicar learns that he cannot read or write. The old man refuses to repair his ignorance, meets the crisis with dignity, self-assurance--and enough shrewdness to make a fortune. Mr. Knowall creates an amusing portrait of a shipboard pest (Nigel Patrick), a pushing braggart, masher and bore, who turns out to be a pretty decent chap when the chips are down.

Sanatorium, the film's longest, most ambitious tale, lacks the focus and tightness of the others. Narrated by Ashenden (Roland Culver), a writer identified by Maugham as "a flattering portrait of the old party who stands before you," it is an ambling, autobiographical reminiscence of life in a Scottish retreat for tuberculosis patients in 1909.

Four sets of characters respond in their own ways--comic, pathetic, gallant--to disease, isolation and the closeness of death. After dallying pleasantly but too long with feuding Scottish eccentrics and chattering spinster types, the story fastens on a bittersweet romance. A worn, still dashing rake (Michael Rennie) falls for a virtuous young girl (Jean Simmons); their love gives them the courage to enter a doomed marriage. Though it wisely avoids both splashy sentiment and a too-stiff upper lip, the story is so diffuse that it is never quite as affecting as it should be. But Sanatorium, like the rest of the movie, benefits immeasurably from the casting, direction and playing of a large and expert British troupe.

To Please a Lady (MGM) continues Hollywood's systematic examination of U.S. vocations. This time it is racing drivers, with Clark Gable as a ruthless daredevil who has left a trail of maimed and slaughtered competitors on dirt tracks across the country. Barbara Stanwyck, a crusading lady columnist, first denounces him and then, inevitably, falls for him. The big problem for Barbara: Is Gable brave or just plain vicious? After twelve minutes of racing footage at Indianapolis Speedway, she presumably gets her answer when Clark crashes his car rather than endanger the life of a rival.

Gable shows more emotion in taking a racing motor apart than in his wooden-faced love scenes (sample dialogue--She: "You're quite a guy." He: "You're quite a dame").

Walk Softly, Stranger (RKO Radio) tells an occasionally moving love story of two cripples, one moral, the other physical. Gambler Joseph Gotten arrives in small town Ashton, Ohio to establish a hideout and a new identity in preparation for holding up a New York gangster. He goes to work in the local factory and falls in love with the manufacturer's daughter (Valli), who has been confined to a wheelchair by a skiing accident. The stickup comes off on schedule, but when Cotten's Co-Thief Paul Stewart arrives in Ashton, the New York gunmen are at his heels.

Producer Robert Sparks never seems quite clear what he is about and Scenarist Frank Fenton has written much of the lovers' dialogue in a symbolic shorthand that adds to the general confusion of motive. As a result, what began with a provocative situation soon degenerates into some routine chase sequences and ends with a mawkish off-to-prison finale.

Right Cross (MGM) deserves credit, but not much, for putting a fairly new gimmick into a boxing story: it encourages the audience to root for its hero (Ricardo Montalban) to lose the big fight. Only if he forfeits the championship can Montalban feel sure that his girl (June Allyson) loves him for himself alone.

The movie also spars with the hero's problem as a Mexican-American whose hypersensitivity as a member of a minority group warps all his personal dealings. But it falls into the bad Hollywood habit of glimpsing truth only long enough to falsify it. Montalban's anxieties are magically dispelled by a happy ending as familiar as Boxing Promoter Lionel Barrymore 's grumpiness. Though Right Cross's ring scenes are pretty well staged, it is a boxing picture with too much yatata and not enough sock.

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