The New Pictures
Pickup (Hugo Haas; Columbia] introduces Hollywood's most promising new moviemaker since Producer Stanley (Champion) Kramer. The film, a simple drama with a high entertainment return on the $83,000 it cost to make, was produced, directed and co-scripted by Czech-born Hugo Haas, 49, who also plays the leading role.
Sharp-sighted moviegoers may recognize Moviemaker Haas as a minor character actor who has specialized in heavies and buffoons (King Solomon's Mines, The Princess and the Pirate). In his U.S. debut as a cinematic Jack-of-all-trades, he uses a small cast of faces even less familiar than his own, and a setting consisting mainly of a railroad lineman's shack along the desert route of the Southern Pacific. But he provides what too many pictures lack: an intriguing idea well suited to movie treatment, and the skill needed to bring it off.
Pickup is a story of an amiable, naive widower (well played by Actor Haas) living out a lonely middle age at a dreary outpost along the railroad tracks. On a visit to a carnival to buy a dog, he meets a calculating blonde floozy (Beverly Michaels), who soon has him at the end of her leash. Unable to resist his $7,000 bank account, she marries him. Then, showing her contempt as broadly as she chews her gum, she waits around for a chance to get rid of her husband and get her hands on his bank account.
The chance comes when Haas goes stone deaf. While his pension is being arranged, the railroad sends a husky young replacement (Allan Nixon) to join him and his wife in the line shack. Haas suddenly regains his hearing in the shock of an automobile accident, but before he can tell anyone his exultant news, he runs into another shock. He hears Nixon wooing his wife, and his wife egging Nixon on to murder Haas--both blandly confident that he is deaf. While he goes on feigning deafness and eavesdropping in full view of the conspirators, the movie becomes a fascinating game of cat & mouse, played for pathos as well as suspense.
Director Haas makes imaginative use of his camera and sound track to bring his story to life. And with Pickup's unromantic, middle-aged hero (a role cut to the measure of France's late Raimu), its sense of character, its tolerance of human frailty and its unglamorous backgrounds, he has produced a picture that is a far cry from the usual Hollywood product.
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Hugo Haas waited almost a decade before resuming the career of scripter-director-actor that won him a reputation in Europe before World War II. After fleeing Czechoslovakia (and later Paris) a jump ahead of the Germans, he made his way to the U.S. Between a wartime job as an OWI broadcaster and stints on the stage in New York and Chicago, he learned enough English to get character roles in Hollywood. With German-born Scripter Arnold Phillips, he prepared the Pickup scenario from a Czech novel, then trudged around to independent producers trying to sell it. "They all said 'fine,' but they all wanted to rewrite it." So Haas put up his life savings ($20,000), borrowed money from friends and shot the picture himself in ten days last March.
After Gossipist Louella Parsons raved over a screening, Columbia bought the picture outright for $125,000. Haas's second movie, The Bridge (cost: $90,000), will be distributed by 20th Century-Fox under a deal that gives him $125,000. And he has already wrapped up his third picture, Thy Neighbor's Wife (cost: more than $100,000).
Haas still lives simply, with his wife and son, in an aging bungalow in a middle-class neighborhood on the fringe of Hollywood. ("I don't see happiness in swimming pools and Cadillac convertibles.") He tries to avoid Hollywood parties ("full of empty talk and stupid pretension") and ignores the offers he has been getting to work for major studios. Explains Haas: "I don't feel I would do my best if I were handed a property by the studio and told to do it. I could not get enthusiastic under those conditions."
Meet Me After the Show (20th Century-Fox) takes place in the Technicolor never-never land inhabited by most cinemusicals, and deals with the improbable problems of a Broadway couple, played by Macdonald Carey and a plump but appetizing Betty Grable. Though starred in a show produced by her husband, Betty frets because she suspects his love is cooling; when she finds him clamped in the embrace of a lush redhead, she is almost sure of it.
After some legal wranglings, Betty feigns amnesia, flounces out of her Park Avenue apartment and on to a Miami plane, headed for the honky-tonk nightclub where she got her start as a singer. Husband Carey and a faithful-dog suitor (Eddie Albert) arrive on the next plane, learn that Betty plans to marry a local beachcomber who wants to take her to the South Seas. This foolishness is somehow resolved when Carey is inadvertently hit on the head with an oar and gets amnesia himself.
Meet Me's dances, staged by Jack Cole, help to rescue the picture from the burden of its mail-order plot. With the support of a stuffed polar bear, Betty appears at her rowdy best in It's a Hot Night in Alaska; against a Pompeian background and supported by half a dozen gigantic and wooden-faced Roman slaves, she is both nimble and funny in No Talent Joe. And the closing number, I Feel Like Dancing, has both melody and imagination, with Betty getting a notable comic assist from Dancer Gwyneth Veron.
That's My Boy (Paramount) gets its moments of fresh, likable comedy from the performances of three veteran nightclub entertainers: Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis (TIME, July 23), and movie newcomer Eddie Mayehoff, who played a stuffy Princeton man in Broadway's Season in the Sun.
Mayehoff, as an ex-All-America given to a middle-aged flexing of his biceps, nearly steals the picture with his efforts to make a real he-man out of his gangling son, played by Jerry Lewis with dental braces, thick-lensed glasses and an I.Q. apparently as low as his morale. Dean Martin, as Jerry's college roommate and the campus football hero, gets the girl (Marion Marshall) as well as the chance to sing a few standard songs (Ballin' the Jack, I'm in the Mood for Love).
Written by Radio Scripter Cy (My Friend Irma) Howard, That's My Boy reaches its comedy high in the opening slapstick sequences between Mayehoff and Lewis, then runs steadily downhill through a thicket of Freudian ABCs and the labored plot complications that lead to Jerry's coming through in the big game.
Mr. Belvedere Rings the Bell (20th Century-Fox) keeps the Clifton Webb series alive, but only at the cost of sabotaging its leading character and committing mayhem on the 1948 Broadway success, The Silver Whistle. This time, the acid, all-knowing Webb is uncomfortably fitted out with a heart of gold, while Robert McEnroe's comedy, on which the movie is based, loses most of its puckish spirit.
In the interests of research, Webb uses false papers to get admitted as a 77-year-old to a dreary old folks' home. Before long, his fellow dotards are capering like retarded children, he has deflated pompous Preacher Hugh Marlowe, and increased the pulse beat of pretty but repressed Nurse Joanne Dru. Then Webb is exposed as a fraudulent oldster and, somewhat irrationally, the other inmates turn against him. Eventually, of course, the old folks re-embrace their benefactor, and Belvedere ends in a damp rush of sentimentality that finds the nurse and preacher in each other's arms, the oldsters acting kittenish again, and Webb walking jauntily off into the sunset.
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