The New Pictures

She's Back on Broadway (Warner) finds Hollywood back at the old Broadway backstage plot. A movie star (Virginia Mayo), down to her last outsize swimming pool, decides to take a fling at the footlights. On Broadway she runs into an old flame (Steve Cochran), a brilliant but erratic stage director (he never wears a tie and likes to smash whisky glasses in the fireplace). They lend their combined talents to a song & dance show called Breakfast in Bed, which is finally put on and becomes a hit. Unfortunately, She's Back on Broadway, with its heavy-handed script and heavy-footed musical numbers, probably never will.

Lili (M-G-M), a thoroughly inconsequential, entirely charming cinemusical, spins a slight Technicolored plot about an orphan girl (Leslie Caron), a young magician (Jean Pierre Aumont) and a romantic puppeteer (Mel Ferrer) in a traveling French carnival. Directed with a deft touch by Charles Walters, Lili is a triumph ot lighthearted manner over lightweight subject matter. In telling of Lili's loves for the magician and the puppeteer it is also genuinely touching.

Director Walters, a veteran choreographer himself, has given the picture visual bounce and a blithe sense of improvisation. The occasional musical numbers are threaded into the story in the form of lightfooted fantasies as Lili dreams she is dancing with Aumont in razzle-dazzle style, or with Ferrer in a gently sentimental mood.

Aumont and Ferrer make attactive leading men but it is Leslie Caron who dances off with the picture. Bringing a gamin grace to the title role, Ballerina Caron has her best opportunity since 1951's An American in Paris to show off her refreshing talents. There is also a troupe of colorful wood and clay puppets manipulated by Ventriloquist Ferrer. The flesh & blood characters in Lili are puppets, too, but they are altogether engaging ones.

The Story of Mandy (J. Arthur Rank; Universal-International), a British-made movie about a little deaf girl, is a clashing blend of documentary and melodrama. With many scenes shot at the Royal Residential Schools for the Deaf in Manchester, the picture has an honestly affecting quality as Mandy is taught to lip-read and eventually to speak. Unfortunately, the scriptwriters have rung in a distracting soap-opera subplot about a romance between Mandy's mother (Phyllis Calvert) and the school's headmaster (Jack Hawkins).

But in its restrained acting and the direction of Alexander (The Man in the White Suit) Mackendrick, the picture never stoops to sentimentality in developing its highly charged central theme. The bleak school setting points up the drama's emotional undertow. There are several striking scenes in which the sound track is entirely deadened to emphasize Mandy's point of view. In the title role, seven-year-old, sad-eyed Mandy Miller gives an appealing pantomime performance. The movie's most eloquent moment: when she first falteringly says the word "mama."

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