The New Pictures

The Atomic City (Paramount) is a neat little B-budget thriller of grade-A caliber about G-men hunting down H-bomb spies. The fun begins when foreign agents kidnap a nuclear physicist's son and hold him for a ransom in atomic formulas. The cops & robbers story is an old formula itself, but the tightly knit screenplay bristles with tingling action and intriguing mechanical devices used by the FBI operatives to track down the criminals: car-to-car telephones, kinescope, television cameras with zoom lenses.

Through Newcomer Jerry Hopper's direction, The Atomic City has a headlong pace and an on-the-spot realism with scenes shot around Los Angeles, Santa Fe and Los Alamos. Edge-of-the-seat sequence: the FBI's helicopter rescue of the kidnaped boy from the precipitous Puye Indian ruins near Los Alamos in a dizzying, cliff-hanging climax.

The Atomic City, made in 24 days for $500,000, is one of a new rash of low-cost pictures (Confidence Girl, the Captive City, The Narrow Margin) known in the trade as "cheapies." Most cheapies are made by independent producers who can cut corners because, unlike a big studio, they have no overhead and no expensive stars under contract. Sometimes they concentrate on a good story and often they get a look of reality by shooting against actual backgrounds.

Typical of cheapie methods are those used by Oldtime Director Andrew (Stormy Weather) Stone. Stone hired a cameraman and two players (Hillary Brooke, Tom Conway) and began shooting a TV film series. When he needed an apartment set, he rented a furnished apartment for one day (at $75). For scenes in a wealthy man's home, Stone used his own in Brentwood. When the script called for a more modest home, he rented one in California's San Fernando Valley for a day, moved the family out until shooting was over. He even used a real police station--free of charge. After he was well into the TV story, Stone realized that he had a possible full-length movie, so he made the necessary alterations in his story. Result: the picture, Confidence Girl, which cost only $55,000, will get A-picture release by United Artists.

Other cheapie-makers who substitute ingenuity for money: Stuntman John Carpenter, who shot a full-length feature (Son of the Renegade) in 5 1/2 days for $18,200; Boris Petroff, who buys up stock shots (i.e., background film), then fills in the stories with inexpensive actors; Herman Cohen, who frankly makes cheapies for the No. 2 spot on double bills; Albert Zugsmith, who arrived in Hollywood two years ago to make TV films, now has four cheapies ready for theater release; William F. Broidy, who put out such pictures as Steel Fist and Sea Tiger for less than $100,000 apiece; Writer Arch Oboler, who has just finished The Twonky, a fantasy about a berserk television machine.

If Moscow Strikes (MARCH OF TIME) is a feature-length documentary dramatizing some of the challenging ideas about science, democracy and war from Dr. Vannevar Bush's 1949 book, Modern Arms and Free Men. As Dr. Bush sets forth his theories before a Maine town-hall gathering, this film effectively illustrates them with newsreel clips, diagrams, animated film and re-enacted scenes.

Dr. Bush, who was boss of all U.S. Government scientists during World Wrar II, traces the evolution of scientific combat through two world wars. Radar, sonar, proximity fuses, guided missiles and atomic bombs, he points out, have almost overnight made modern warfare incalculably more swift and destructive than ever before. Even more awesome weapons are imminent: atomic rockets guided by television and atom missiles launched from submarines.

In the face of such nuclear juggernauts, can civilization survive a totalitarian onslaught? Dr. Bush is optimistic. Another great war need not come, he says, if democracy stocks its arsenal of preparedness --and its arsenal of liberty. The mightiest of modern arms, Dr. Bush concludes, cannot crush free men armed with the resourcefulness and ideals of democracy.

Macao (RKO Radio), set on the Portuguese island of that name off the coast of Hong Kong, appears to be inhabited by characters who bear a striking resemblance to the types that populate the never-never land of moviedom. On hand are a sultry nightclub singer (Jane Russell), an intrepid adventurer (Robert Mitchum), and an American cop (William Bendix) who is rubbed out while running down the sinister proprietor (Brad Dexter) of the Quick

Reward, Macao's largest gambling establishment.

Jane sings One for My Baby in a gold gown, You Kill Me in a white, off-the-shoulder number, and clinches with Mitch-urn on a sampan, a yacht and a bed. Mitchum rescues Jane from an overly amorous admirer, stalks danger along the waterfront and over rooftops, avenges Bendix' death and bares his torso to the camera. During all this activity, Jane rolls her eyes at intervals and effectively registers two moods: petulance and boredom. Meanwhile, Mitchum maintains his sleepy-eyed deadpan.

This amalgam of corn and cleavage has been handsomely directed by Josef von

Sternberg as if it mattered. Sample bit of dialogue as Mitchum ogles Jane. She: "Enjoy the view?" He: "It isn't the Taj Mahal or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, but it'll do."

The Pride of St. Louis (20th Century-Fox) is an amiable, minor-league movie biography of major-league baseball's Jerome Herman Dean (Dan Dailey). In familiar screen style, the picture chronicles the ups & downs of "Dizzy's" career: his rise from Arkansas hillbilly with a knack for pitching and mispronunciation to pitching ace with the St. Louis Cardinals; the arm injury that forced him out of baseball in 1941; his comeback as a successful sport "commertater."

Striving to wring off-the-diamond drama from its subject, the picture poses a rather odd and artificial triangle: Dizzy loves both his wife (Joanne Dru) and baseball. More authentic but with no higher cinematic batting average is the movie's climax: Dizzy triumphing over objections by teachers' organizations to his barefoot-boy grammar on the airwaves. Dan Dailey makes a likable Huck Finn in spikes, complete with such Dean-Arkansas accents as "slud into third base" and "the batter takes a stanch at the plate." In their own way, Joanne Dru's curves are as impressive as Dizzy's.

Carbine Williams (MGM) fictionalizes the real-life story of David Marshall Williams (James Stewart), who perfected a revolutionary carbine while serving a 30-year sentence for manslaughter. More factual than inspired, Carbine Williams often draws a blank dramatically.

In flashback, the picture tells of Williams' 1921 conviction for the killing of a Prohibition officer during a raid on a North Carolina moonshine still, his experiences in solitary and on a back-breaking chain gang, his development of a lightweight, short-stroke carbine, using only automobile and tractor axles, a fence post, hacksaw and handfile in a prison blacksmith shop.*The happy ending: his pardon in 1929.

As the mountaineer, gangling James Stewart lopes easily through his role. Wendell Corey stiffly plays Captain H. T. Peoples, former superintendent of Caledonia State Prison Camp, who encouraged Williams to work on the carbine, and whose magazine reminiscences of the event inspired the making of the movie.

*Williams' principles were embodied in 8,000,00 World War II carbines

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