Imports

The Blue Lamp (Ealing Studios; Eagle Lion Classics), a touted import, is a bland, semi-documentary melodrama in praise of the London police. The picture's excitement runs thin compared with the better Hollywood cops & robbers product, and its humor is as heavy as plum pudding, but U.S. moviegoers may be diverted by its foreign flavor.

The bobbies are all benign, high-minded, comradely chaps, as alike as the buttons on a uniform. At home, they grow begonias; in the clubby atmosphere of the station house, they grab spare moments for darts and glee-club practice.

Even the underworld, or at least its old guard, gets sympathetic treatment from The Blue Lamp. The plot is pegged on the London police's tradition of doing their duty without firearms. The film suggests that socially adjusted lawbreakers respect this tradition, but one amateurish criminal upstart (Dirk Bogarde) loses his head and plugs the picture's most likable bobby (Jack Warner). The courage of the unarmed police closing in on the gun-toting killer invites both admiration and suspense. What should most impress U.S. fans, however, is the reaction of London gangland's staunch conservatives: well aware that shooting a bobby simply isn't done, they help the police to hunt down their man.

Face to the Wind (Lafayette Films) is a little French comedy with some charm and inventiveness, but not quite enough to fill out its time. Cynical and sentimental by turns, the movie shows how a resourceful gang of urchins bring a measure of prosperity and spiritual uplift to the slums of Montmartre by the roundabout device of kidnaping pedigreed dogs.

The "dog-naping"' begins as a summertime lark, soon burgeons into a well-organized, well-paying racket whose wealthy victims are invariably demoralized by the sight of the gang's own dog picking up the ransom at the payoff rendezvous. When the spoils grow too large for the nine youngsters to spend safely on themselves, they transform Montmartre with such anonymous good deeds as giving an elderly couple the funds for a marriage license to celebrate 40 years of unwedded bliss.

Unfortunately, the film's continuity is almost as ragged as its moppets, and just as inclined to make too much of a good thing. But Director Robert Varnay knows how to cut loose a camera for comic effect, and the kids (Jacques Gencel,* Sophie Leclair, De Meulan, et al.) appear human and likable, never consciously cute, and seldom more precocious than a childhood on Montmartre streets might warrant.

Operation Disaster (J. Arthur Rank; Universal-International), like all submarine fiction, operates under a handicap. Jules Verne worked out most of the possibilities, and what he overlooked has been overworked since his time. Of all the variations, the plight of crewmen trapped 15 fathoms deep is probably the hardiest, and gets sensitive treatment in this British movie.

The movie takes a matter-of-fact tack that avoids both melodramatics and over-stiffening of the upper lip. The question of who leaves the wreck and who must stay is made absorbing; so are such technical details as feeding air through the hull and deliberately flooding a hatch preparatory to escape. Even more to the film's credit, the familiar motifs of fear, courage and duty gain unusual force from soundly written characters and fine performances, notably by John (Great Expectations) Mills as the commander, Richard (The Guinea Pig) Attenborough, James (Trio) Hayter and Nigel (Trio) Patrick.

* Who is being imported by Paramount to appear with Bing Crosby in the forthcoming Here Comes the Groom.

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