The New Pictures

Singing in the Rain (MGM) reunites Dancing Star Gene Kelly and Producer Arthur Freed of the Academy Award-winning An American in Paris with a screenplay by Adolph Green and Betty Comden, who wrote Kelly's highly successful On the Town. The result, though pretty and tuneful, is not so opulent as the first, nor so inventive as the second.

The wordy book about the era when the movies were learning to talk is a rather strenuous satire, without much warmth or wit. Kelly is a silent-film favorite who makes the transition to talkies with the help and kibitzing of sidekick Donald O'Connor. Jean Hagen is Kelly's beautiful-but-not-so-bright leading lady whose squeaky voice is not O.K. for sound. Debbie Reynolds, the girl hired to do Jean's behind-the-camera talking and singing, finally wins both public acclaim and Kelly.

The musical numbers, smoothly staged by Kelly and Stanley Donen, are built around such oldtime songs as You Were Meant for Me, You Are My Lucky Star, and the picture's title tune,* most of them by Producer-Lyricist Freed and Composer Nacio Herb Brown. There is a delightful sequence in which Kelly dances down a puddle-filled street in a Technicolor downpour, and there are several gay take-offs on supercolossal Busby Berkeley girlie routines. But the show's biggest song & dance number is far from the best: a flossy 15-minute ballet about the Roaring Twenties that makes up in size what it lacks in sparkle.

Sweet-faced Debbie Reynolds manages to keep up with Kelly's fast stepping, but it is sultry Cyd Charisse who brings some real dancing excitement to the film in the finale.

My Six Convicts (Stanley Kramer; Columbia), based on Psychologist Donald Powell Wilson's 1951 bestseller about his prison experiences, comes to the screen accenting the corn instead of the criminology. The book was a sprightly account of a three-year research project into the relationship between drug addiction and criminality, which Wilson conducted at Leavenworth in the early '30s for the U.S. Public Health Service. It also told of the six convicts who assisted him--and who tested him as much as he tested them.

The picture is a fairly lively but less legitimate account of these not-so-legitimate characters. The prison backgrounds were realistically filmed at San Quentin, but the six convicts are now jailbirds of a more flamboyant feather. Among their activities, which have been broadly colored up for movie purposes: smuggling the wife of a fellow convict into prison in a crate marked "Highly Inflammable"; saving Psychologist Wilson (John Beal) from being used by a psychopathic killer as a jailbreak shield. To these extravagant exploits the picture adds others even more farfetched: the convicts operating a bookie joint called the Psychosomatic Bookkeeping Co. in the psychologist's office; Wilson quelling a near prison riot singlehanded.

For a film that is supposedly about criminal psychology, My Six Convicts strives a bit too hard to be something-for-everybody entertainment. Acting honors go to Gilbert Roland, the volatile gangster, and to Millard Mitchell, the laconic safecracker, who has his day of glory in Kansas City opening a jammed vault at the request of bank authorities.

*From the 1929 M-G-M musical, Hollywood Revue.

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