The New Pictures

Just for You (Paramount) casts Bing Crosby as a paragon of Broadway show producers. When he is not putting on one smash hit after another and showing his leading men how to sing songs and make love to the leading lady (Jane Wyman), he is throwing gay first-night penthouse parties, where he croons such ditties as Zing a Little Zong. But Widower Bing is so busy being famous that he is a flop with his teen-age children. His daughter (Natalie Wood) winds up in jail with her drunken governess. His adolescent son (Robert Arthur) resents Bing's critical attitude toward his songwriting attempts, and tries to beat his father's time with Jane Wyman.

Bing soon mops up these messy situations. He gets his daughter admitted to an exclusive girls' school by calling Old Headmistress Ethel Barrymore "darling," and by singing an oldtime vaudeville number at the school's annual musicale. As for his son, Bing gets one of his songs, Just for You, published. Sample lyric: "Spring is here and all the pretty flowers that grow, grow just for you. Skies are clear and all the little stars that glow, glow just for you." At about this point, when it is plain that Bing will make the grade with his children, it is equally obvious that Just for You will never make the grade as a merry cinemusical.

One Minute to Zero (Edmund Grainger; RKO Radio) finds sleepy-eyed Robert Mitchum, as a U.S. infantryman, helping outmaneuver the Reds in Korea in 1950. Colonel Mitchum knocks out a Communist supply route and turns the U.S. defensive into an offensive on the eve of the Inchon invasion. As a result, he is promoted to general and wins the love of Ann Blyth. a cute member of a U.N. health & sanitation team in Korea.

One Minute to Zero has the regulation quota of action scenes and combat heroics. One sequence, in which Mitchum orders the shelling of a civilian refugee column that harbors Communist guerrillas, was found objectionable by the Department of Defense. The producers of the picture refused to eliminate the scene, and it remains the only unusual feature in a formula film.

The Stranger In Between (J. Arthur Rank; Universal-International), called Hunted in England, is a suspense-filled movie about a six-year-old orphan boy who falls in with a murderer fleeing from the police. The chase, leading across England and Scotland and through a series of such colorful settings as a pawnshop, a boarding house, an amusement gallery and a small fishing village, has been staged with cinematic vigor by Director Charles (The Lavender Hill Mob) Crichton.

But The Stranger In Between also offers what is rarer in a chase film: the human sympathy that grows up between the orphan boy, who is afraid to return to his cruel foster parents, and the young man, who has killed his floozy-wife's lover. At first the two string along together out of necessity, but finally each develops a real affection for the other. Dirk Bogarde gives an intense performance as the fugitive, and towheaded Jon Whiteley is a sad-eyed, touching figure as the boy.

The World in His Arms (Universal-International). The history books say that the U.S. bought Alaska--then known as Russian America--from Russia in 1867 for $7,200,000. At the time, the "Esquimaux acquisition" of. 590,884 square miles of snowy wasteland, an area equal to nearly one-fifth of the continental U.S., was called "the icebox of the North" and "Seward's folly" (Secretary of State William H. Seward instigated the deal).

This movie tells the story differently: Alaska was acquired during the 18503 by a brave Yankee sea captain (Gregory Peck) with the help of a fetching Russian countess (Ann Blyth). When Captain Peck was not negotiating outsized real-estate deals, he was quite a devil with the girls. After some profitable seal poaching in the Pribilofs, Peck disembarks from his schooner, the Pilgrim, at San Francisco's Barbary Coast and heads for the Bon Ton cafe. There he drinks a toast to "girls and gunpowder." At a fancy ball, he meets Ann, who is really a Czarist aristocrat. "Who are you?" he asks. "Just a girl," she says. "What kind of a girl?" "Just a Russian girl," she says.

Peck has no end of troubles. He not only has to sink an Imperial Russian gunboat captained by Czarist Prince Carl Esmond, a nasty sort who is determined that Peck shall get neither Ann nor Alaska. He also has to fight the gang of a rival seal poacher (Anthony Quinn) with fists, meat cleavers and belaying pins. By the time this pulp plot has run its course, Alaska is secure in the hands of the U.S., and Peck, at the wheel of the Pilgrim, holds Ann (i.e., the world) in his arms as they sail back to a Technicolored San Francisco.

Ivory Hunter (J. Arthur Rank; Universal-International) is a western set in East Africa. Inspired by the real-life story of Colonel Mervyn Cowie, founder of the Kenya Royal National Parks, the picture tells of a game warden (Anthony Steel) who establishes a 2,000-sq. mi. sanctuary for African game. Before he makes a success of the project, he is attacked by a leopard, a lioness and a rhinoceros. He also copes with a rinderpest epidemic anc the villainy of an ivory poacher (Harold Warrender).

The movie brings fine Technicolor views of African wildlife and scenery. Steel makes a stalwart game warden and Warrender is a slick heavy, but the four-legged actors lope away with the show.

Les Miserables (20th Century-Fox) is the ninth screen version of Victor Hugo's classic manhunt.* The 1862 novel told of the simple, hard-working peasant, Jean Valjean, who served 19 years in the g; leys for stealing a loaf of bread for his starving sister and her children, finally became a prosperous merchant and philanthropist and, because he violated his parole by not reporting to the police, was hounded right to the barricades of the French revolution and through the sewers of Paris by stern, implacable Inspector Javert.

Generally faithful to the original story, the new version is less faithful to the book's romantic sweep and excitement. The chase scenes, involving Javert (Robert Newton) and Valjean (Michael Rennie), are routine with a run-of-the-barri-cade revolutionary sequence and a fairly picturesque tour through the Paris sewers. Lacking the novel's insistence on the theme of good v. evil, this Les Miserables is neither good red melodrama nor black-&-white morality. It is mainly a costume piece.

* Other notable screen Les Miserables: a 1918 Hollywood production with William Farnum as Jean Valjean; a 1934 French adaptation with Harry Baur; a 1935 Hollywood version with Fredric March as Valjean and Charles Laughton as Javert; a 1951 Italian production with Gino Cervi.

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