The New Pictures

Payment on Demand (Skirball & Manning; RKO Radio) is the story of a marriage and a divorce. Almost up to the time it opened last week in Manhattan, its producers were undecided whether it should also be the story of a reconciliation. After testing the picture before preview audiences, they have experimented with four different endings.

Though such indecision is often a dangerous symptom, Payment on Demand is good enough for moviegoers to care how it ends. The plot is not far removed from soap opera, but thanks to painstaking treatment and acting, it is a comfortable distance. Back again at the old tricks she discarded for All About Eve, Bette Davis plays a hateful woman as well as ever.

After 20 years of marriage which have brought him wealth, position, and two attractive daughters, Steel Executive Barry Sullivan staggers his wife by asking for a divorce. Flashbacks show how Bette grew from simple beginnings into a money-hungry snob who tried to shape her husband into her own image of success. Then she goes off on a cruise, learns something about loneliness, drifts from self-pity to remorse, is tearfully ready at last to patch things up.

But will long-suffering husband Sullivan take her back? The whole skillfully effected sense of the movie seems to rebel at that notion, but the preview audiences evidently did not. Co-Producer Bruce Manning and Director Curtis Bernhart, who wrote the script together, compromise. They have the taste to end the picture on a muted, tentative note, but not the courage to keep the ending from clashing with their theme.

Cause for Alarm! (MGM) rates its exclamation point as the year's first thriller with an honest quota of thrills. It pulls off the old Hitchcock trick of giving commonplace people, events and settings a sinister meaning, and it develops its simple, one-track idea with frightening logic.

Housewife Loretta Young's husband (Barry Sullivan) lies in bed nursing a bad heart and the sick delusion that his wife and his doctor (Bruce Cowling) are in love and planning to kill him. He writes the accusation into a letter full of circumstantial details, addresses it to the district attorney. After Loretta innocently hands it to the postman, Sullivan boasts about it and dies.

In growing frenzy, Loretta sets about trying to get the letter out of the mails before anyone can discover that her husband is dead. With his body lying in the upstairs bedroom, the casual routine of suburban life suddenly becomes perilous at every turn. Almost every move she makes unwittingly buttresses the lie in the letter--and forces her into ever greater risks of self-incrimination to keep the letter from reaching the district attorney.

Instead of the gloom-shrouded photography that has become standard in Hollywood melodrama, the movie wisely stresses the quiet, sunny atmosphere of a pleasant residential street.

Actress Young is seldom out of Director Tay Garnett's camera; her excellent acting almost turns Cause for Alarm! into a one-woman show. But a tight script by Mel (The Window) Dinelli and Producer Tom Lewis also contains rounded minor roles, unusually well played by Margalo Gillmore as a garrulous busybody and Irving Bacon as a footsore postman slogging toward his pension.

The 13th Letter (20th Century-Fox). While Cause for Alarm! creates keen suspense with a single letter, this more ambitious movie gets almost none at all with a whole batch of them.

In a small Quebec town, a handsome doctor (Michael Rennie) receives a crude, anonymous note warning him to stop fooling with the wife of an older colleague (Charles Boyer). Though he hardly knows he woman, the doctor continues to get etters. So do Boyer, his wife, and other people all over town. Before the writer is , unmasked, he causes the suicide of a hospitalized veteran, the arrest of a nurse (Judith Evelyn), a misunderstanding in Rennie's romance with a patient (Linda Darnell).

Filmed near Montreal with a good cast gathered from four countries, the movie is a remake of France's 1948 The Raven. Though it was overcontrived, the original whipped up a floridly menacing atmosphere that made its implausibilities exciting. Still contrived, Producer-Director Otto (Forever Amber) Preminger's version goes to the opposite extreme; it drags along sedately, frittering away its climaxes in the picturesque Quebec scenery. The picture is notable chiefly for introducing onetime Matinee Idol Charles Boyer as a character actor, wearing grey whiskers instead of his familiar toupee.

Cry Danger (RKO Radio) pictures a scramble, by a group of unattractive double-and triple-crossers to get their hands on a stolen $100,000 payroll. Most of the time ex-Bookie Dick Powell is a fall guy; he serves five years for a crime he didn't commit, is freed on the basis of a faked alibi by a bemedaled Marine veteran (who only wants to be cut in on the $100,000), is repeatedly bilked and shot at by Gangster William Conrad and sweet-faced Rhonda Fleming.

Richard Erdman is effective as an alcoholic, one-legged marine who is out for a fast buck, and Regis Toomey plays a bored-with-crime cop who encourages the gunmen to eliminate each other. Powell displays admirable stubbornness of purpose in the face of almost total frustration.

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