The New Pictures

Road to Bali (Paramount) is the sixth in the highly successful Bing Crosby Bob Hope Dorothy Lamour Road series* and the first in Technicolor. Like its predecessors, this entry hews to the established Road musicomedy formula: plenty of gags & girls strung on a practically non-existent plot line. This time, Bing and Bob are a couple of broken down vaudevillians who hire themselves out as deep sea divers in a quest for sunken treasure off the island of Vatu. Along the way, they encounter a dastardly South Sea prince (Murvyn Vye), a Balinese princess of Scottish ancestry (Dorothy Lamour), an amorous gorilla and a giant squid. In addition, there are brief, improbable appearances by Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Bob Crosby, Humphrey Bogart (pulling The African Queen through the swamps) and Jane Russell (whom Hope conjures from a basket with a magic horn).

Bing and Bob, dressed in kilts, sing one number called Hoot Mon. Dorothy Lamour models a succession of silk and cloth-of-gold sarongs designed by Hollywood's Edith Head. There is also a shipwreck, a headhunters' ceremonial, and an erupting volcano. Road to Bali does not always run a smooth comedy course, but it has some diverting detours.

Blackbeard, the Pirate (Edmund Grainger; RKO Radio), an expensively Technicolored penny dreadful, casts Robert Newton as the infamous 18th century privateer Edward Teach, popularly known as Blackbeard. In this fanciful biography, Blackbeard is as blackhearted a buccaneer as ever sailed the Spanish Main. As one of his own crew puts it, he "would make the flesh crawl on a squid." His shaggy beard daintily decorated with red ribbons, Blackbeard goes about flogging, stabbing and stringing up his enemies with the greatest of gusto, laughing fiendishly all the while. He cuts his rivals' throats, runs them through the gizzards and lashes them to the mast. But Blackbeard's dark deeds finally catch up with him when his own men, led by First Mate William Bendix, bury him up to his neck in the sand and leave him to await the incoming tide (in real life, Blackbeard was shot by a British lieutenant on the high seas in 1718).

Robert Newton, chewing at all the scenery, seems to be having a wonderful time in the title role. Good decorative note: Linda Darnell as a fiery wench who flounces around Blackbeard's vessel in a series of stunning plunging necklines.

Stop, You're Killing Me (Warner) sets some more of Damon Runyon's guys & dolls to music.* This tuned-up version of the old (1935) Runyon-Howard Lindsay comedy, A Slight Case of Murder, filmed for the first time in 1938 with Edward G. Robinson, still has as its setting the Saratoga mansion of Beer Baron Marko (Broderick Crawford) in the post-Prohibition era. Here is assembled an assortment of corpses & coppers, mugs & molls, touts & thugs, not to mention a couple of bankers attempting to foreclose on Marko's needled beer brewery, an obnoxious six-year-old orphan with a squirt gun (Louis Lettieri), and a dowager with a lorgnette (Margaret Dumont).

Broderick Crawford as the beefy, blustering beer tycoon is authentic Runyon. So are Claire Trevor as his brassy, blonde wife and Charles Cantor. Sheldon Leonard and Joe Vitale as a trio of plug-uglies. When it deals with such raffish low-life as Little Dutch. Black Hat Gallagher, No Nose Cohen and Sad Sam, the picture is good fun. But when it plunges into flossy songs & dances in Technicolor, Stop, You're Killing Me becomes merely a slight case of murder of Runyon's original.

Against All Flags (Universal-International) finds fearless Errol Flynn as a British naval officer pitted against some 18th century pirates. Disguised as a deserter, Flynn infiltrates the Madagascar stronghold of the pirates, where he comes to grips with evil Captain Anthony Quinn and fiery Corsair Queen Maureen O'Hara. No sooner does Maureen lay eyes on Flynn than she says: "You're a regular rooster." Replies Flynn: "You seem to be a high-spirited chick yourself." Gradually, their conversation takes on a tenderer tone. Upon discovering that Maureen's real name is Prudence and not Spitfire, Flynn remarks: "It's a lovely name, as lovely as the dew on primroses in the morning."

In the end, of course, Flynn impales Quinn on his sword, saves the pretty daughter of the Emperor of India from the buccaneers, scuttles the pirates and sails off with Maureen aboard a British manofwar. By then, Against All Flags has long since scuttled itself as an adventure yarn.

-The other Roads: Singapore (1940), Zanzibar (1941), Morocco (1942), Utopia (1945), Rio (1947)--Other Runyonesque cinemusicals: soth Century-Fox's current Bloodhounds of Broadway (TIME, Dec. i), Columbia's forthcoming The Broadway Story.

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