The New Pictures

Harriet Craig (Columbia). George Kelly's Craig's Wife, a play about a woman whose passion for tidiness destroyed her marriage, was a 1926 Pulitzer Prizewinner. In 1936, as a movie starring Rosalind Russell and John Boles, it was rated one of the better pictures of the year. Hollywood's current version is not so successful.

Wearing a mannish hairdo, Joan Crawford plays the overneat Harriet Craig with sexy emphasis. As her thoroughly housebroken husband, Wendell Corey is careful never to drop ashes on the rugs, sit on the arm of the sofa, or put a damp glass on an end table. Besides riding herd on Corey, Joan bullies her servants, snipes at the inoffensive widow next door, tries to break up K.T. Stevens' romance with William Bishop. Her ineffectual villain'es come to a head when, to prevent her husband's going alone to Japan on business, she defames him to his employer.

In the original Craig's Wife, Playwright Kelly wrote of a woman who loved her home more than her husband and was willing to risk involving him in a murder because speaking out might threaten her home. Scripters Anne Froelick and James Gunn have dropped the murder from the plot of Harriet Craig. They concern themselves instead with a jealous woman who tries to dominate her husband. This may be the reason the movie loses headway early and becomes a tiresome wait for the worm to turn and give Joan Crawford her comeuppance.

Dark City (Paramount) is a snail-paced thriller about three tin horn gamblers pursued by an avenging psychopath. It also introduces to the screen a sullen, Bogart-style newcomer from television, Charlton Heston.

For his first picture, Heston is cast as a Cornell alumnus with a blemished war record (while a pilot in England he took time off between bombing runs to murder his wife's lover). This tragedy has somehow reduced him to running a Chicago handbook that is always being raided by the police. In desperation, Heston turns card sharper and, with two cronies, fleeces a sucker of $5,000. The sucker commits suicide, leaving behind a wife and child as well as a maniacal brother who sets out to eliminate the gamblers. He throttles two of them and has a lethal half nelson on Heston before the police intervene.

Producer Hal Wallis has decked out this contrived story with standard melodramatic props: dark shadows, windblown curtains, the strangler's poised hands. Ed Begley has a nice bit part as a gambler with ulcers. Heston is appropriately tough with Nightclub Singer Lizabeth Scott and predictably sentimental with Widow Viveca Lindfors.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.