The New Pictures

Goodbye, My Fancy (Warner], a slick adaptation of the 1948 Broadway hit comedy, gives Joan Crawford a chance to preen her plumage and practice her intellect as a glamorous Congresswoman who would sooner compromise a man than an issue.

The script takes Congresswoman Crawford back to Good Hope College, to accept an honorary degree and renew her friendship with a professor (Robert Young), now the college president, whom she shielded 20 years before when she was expelled from college for staying out all night with him. She is pursued by a LIFE photographer (Frank Lovejoy), who wants to renew the romance they began when she was a glamorous war correspondent.

President Young seems about to win the Congresswoman's vote when she learns that he is truckling to a stuffy trustee (Howard St. John) who wants to suppress a controversial documentary film she has brought to the campus. After threatening to expose their 20-year-old escapade, Joan finally gets the film shown.

Actress Crawford rides her vehicle regally, though it moves too slowly now & then, and a good cast (including Eve Arden as the Congresswoman's flip secretary) trails along, tossing garlands of Playwright Fay Kanin's bright dialogue and remnants of her original message. On Broadway, the heroine's controversial documentary was an antiwar film. In the Hollywood version, she sponsors a movie preaching academic freedom. As the scripters handle it, this glib switch--no doubt an expedient one--leaves the issue so vaguely generalized that, for all the picture's righteous pounding, it rings pretty hollow.

Appointment with Danger (Paramount) is the same rendezvous Alan Ladd has been keeping for years as a stoic man of action whose natural habitat is a daydream by Walter Mitty. But this time tight plotting, realistic backgrounds and good casting take much of the curse off the part of the synthetic tough guy who has made dangerous living into a comfortable livelihood for Actor Ladd.

After numerous Hollywood tributes to G-men and T-men, the movie is also the first to glorify the federal sleuths of the Post Office Inspection Service (who now. presumably qualify for abbreviation as P-men). When a post-office inspector is murdered, Inspector Ladd gets the job of running down the killers. He finds his suspects planning a foolproof $1,000,000 postal robbery, joins the gang's conspiracy in the guise of a bribe-hungry cop. Ladd's risky masquerade finally lands him in a mess that only fists, bullets and fast footwork can straighten out, but not before the picture works its familiar story into well-tied knots of suspense.

The movie's authentic toughness is supplied by its gangsters, notably Paul Stewart, playing a shrewd, efficient planner, and Jack Webb as an itchy-fingered gunman. The settings look at least as hard as the hoodlums: littered alleys, poolrooms, shabby hotels and stretches of industrial wasteland filmed on location in Gary, Ind., South Chicago and Los Angeles.

Mercifully, the script omits the standard love interest. As if only for the record, it briefly establishes Ladd's romantic prowess in a token dalliance with Stewart's blonde mistress (well played by Jan Sterling). The real leading lady is a nun (Phyllis Calvert) who needs his protection as the only witness to the murder. Inspector Ladd, who usually measures his fellow man with cynical suspicion, soon finds himself softening under the example of her unselfish sense of duty. At this late date, moviegoers should not be surprised to learn that Nun Calvert wears lipstick and coaches baseball.

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman

(MGM) is a Technicolored pastiche of symbolism, the supernatural and old romantic claptrap. Filmed picturesquely in Spain by Coproducer-Scripter-Director Albert Lewin, the movie begins by pairing a modem Pandora (Ava Gardner) with the legendary Dutchman himself (James Mason). From there it goes on to bullfighting, reincarnation, suicide, auto-racing, murder, archaeology, an insistent verse by Omar Khayyam and a couple of interacting love triangles.

As Pandora, Actress Gardner is a cruelly flighty American girl who drives men to distraction at a Spanish Mediterranean resort. She is also the very image of the Dutch wife for whose murder, four centuries earlier, Mason is doomed to sail the seas until he can find a woman willing to die for him. Omar Khayyam's moving finger, worked to the bone by Scripter Lewin, brings the two together during the brief interval (once every seven years) in which Mason's curse permits him to make port.

Though she is already hotly pursued by the greatest matador in all Spain and engaged to the world's fastest auto-racer, Ava feels drawn to the mysterious stranger. At length, while an ominous soundtrack narrator keeps describing what is all too visible on the screen, and the camera catches some revealing glimpses of Ava swimming out to his anchored ship, the picture's catchall plots bring selfish Ava to the point where she will gladly give her life for love of him. But Mason loves her too much to let her do it. Another flick of Omar's finger solves this high-flown problem. Only then, having writ for 123 long minutes, does the moving finger move mercifully on.

Go for Broke! (MGM) adds another laurel to one of the most decorated U.S. combat units of World War II,* the Nisei of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Treated at first with taunts and suspicion, rankled by the knowledge that their families were herded into resettlement camps, the Nisei proved themselves both loyal Americans and superb fighting men.

Go for Broke! (from the regimental motto, a piece of Hawaiian dice-shooting slang for "Shoot the works!") follows the outfit from a U.S. training camp into the heat of the Italian and French campaigns. It tells the story largely in terms of a Texas-proud lieutenant (Van Johnson) whose Nisei men gradually overcome his prejudice against them. At the climax, the 442nd's rescue of a trapped battalion of the 36th (Texas) Infantry Division in France's Vosges Mountains, even Johnson's diehard, Jap-hating buddy (Don Haggerty) takes the Nisei to his bosom.

Produced as a personal project by M-G-M Production Chief Dore Schary and scripted by Robert Pirosh, the team which made Battleground together, the movie wisely avoids self-conscious preachments, lets its message of tolerance and fair play come through in the action, if sometimes a bit crudely. To his credit, Scripter Pirosh, who doubled as director, has given his Nisei characters (including veterans of the 442nd) a background of strikingly realistic battle scenes and endowed them with a wry, grim humor that suits them both as G.I.s and as a minority long since inured to getting the short end of the stick.

Go for Broke! would be even better if its makers had not tried to improve on the truth with hokum that Hollywood palms off in the name of showmanship. Sample: fanciful advice to tourists on the sound track, misquoted from the Army's wartime guidebooks, to contrast with shots of battle hardship and drudgery.

* Seven distinguished unit citations, 4,902 individual decorations, including one Medal of Honor 47 Distinguished Service Crosses, an estimated 3,600 Purple Hearts.

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