The New Pictures

The Thief (Harry Popkin; United Artists) takes its inspiration from the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words: it is a sound film in which no one ever speaks. The movie manages to get along quite well without dialogue because it is an uncomplicated chase thriller told with the camera on a simple physical and psychological level. The thief is a nuclear physicist (Ray Milland) employed by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, where he is microfilming top secret documents for a foreign spy ring. When the FBI gets on his trail, he flees to New York, kills a Government agent in a chase to the top of the Empire State Building, and is about to escape overseas on a freighter when his conscience rather abruptly gets the better of him, and he voluntarily gives himself up to the FBI.

The spies, more or less naturally, operate behind a wall of silence: they communicate with each other by telephonic signals and by notes written on the back of cigarette wrappers. The only time Milland himself opens his mouth is when he breaks down and sobs during the strain of the chase. But though the picture is wordless, it is not actually silent. It has a rich, sometimes overemphatic musical score. And it has all sorts of literal sound effects: the click of a microfilm camera, the rustle of papers, the jangle of telephones, the blare of radios, opening & closing doors. Unfortunately, Director Russell Rouse (who also co-authored the screenplay with Producer Clarence Greene) has not used his sound track, or his camera, in a particularly imaginative way. The Thief is an interesting stunt and a fairly exciting thriller. But in telling its story visually, it merely proves what has been obvious ever since sound came to the screen: most movies talk far too much.

The Fourposter (Stanley Kramer; Columbia) is unique for being a movie with only two characters and one set. The picture traces the milestones of a marriage from the vantage point of a bedchamber in a Manhattan brownstone: the turn-of-the-century wedding night; the arrival of the first baby; the crisis over the other woman; the son's death in World War I; the daughter's wedding in the jazz-mad '20s; the husband (Rex Harrison) reliving the high spots of the marriage with the vision of his departed wife (Lilli Palmer) just before he, too, dies.

Jan de Hartog's 1951 comedy-drama,* on which the picture is based, was a theatrical tour de force that capitalized on the physical limitations of the stage. But on the expansive screen, it becomes a motion picture with a minimum of motion and a maximum of sugary sentiment. The result is a fourposter that often creaks and sags. England's suave Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer, his real-life wife, play their parts smoothly, though they sometimes seem over-sophisticated for the homey couple they are supposed to be. The picture owes nothing to the stage original for its outstanding feature: a gaily animated cartoon that bridges sequences, depicting the changing world outside the bedroom.

Because You're Mine (MGM) is an undernourished cinemusical starring a slimmed-down (156 Ib.) Mario Lanza (who tipped 220 Ibs. in last year's The Great Caruso). Lanza plays a drafted opera star who gets involved with a hardboiled, musically inclined sergeant (James Whitmore) and his pretty, singing sister (Doretta Morrow). In the course of the plot, Lanza, singing in a voice distinguished for its sheer volume, delivers 14 numbers, ranging from Il Trovatore and Cavalleria Rusticana arias to All the Things You Are, in a variety of settings, from an opera stage and a nightclub to an army guardhouse and a telephone booth. As one of the characters in the picture remarks: "I'll admit there's nothing wrong with his throat, but that's as far as I'll go."

The Lusty Men (Wald-Krasna; RKO Radio) is a cowboy picture without rustlers or a sheriff. Its subject is the modern cowpoke who makes a handsome but hazardous living being kicked by broncos and gored by steers on the rodeo circuit. The picture has some rousing scenes of rough-riding thrills & spills photographed at the Pendleton, Tucson, Livermore, Cheyenne and Spokane rodeos, but the story that runs through these sequences soon develops a limp.

It starts off promisingly as a character study of tensions among the hard-riding, hard-living members of the broken-bone-and-bandage set, but soon falls into a conventional movie mold. A Texas cowhand (Arthur Kennedy) becomes a champion rider with the help of a has-been rodeo ace (Robert Mitchum). But Kennedy has a beautiful red-haired wife (Susan Hay-ward). So just as much action begins to develop outside the rodeo arena as inside when the two men tangle over the lady. The gustiest characterization in The Lusty Men is provided by Arthur Hunnicutt as a punchy ex-broncobuster with a busted leg.

*Still running on Broadway with Burgess Meredith and Betty Field, who succeeded Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy.

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