The New Pictures

The Juggler (Stanley Kramer; Columbia) following a strong current trend in Hollywood, was filmed mostly on location --in this case, the harshly beautiful city streets and countryside of Israel. But unlike most such movies, this one manages to set some believable people in motion against its real backgrounds. A once famed German juggler (Kirk Douglas), mentally unbalanced as a result of having seen his wife and two children killed in a Nazi concentration camp, comes to Israel in 1949 as a D.P. His unreasoned fear of authority leads him to strike a policeman who asks for his identification papers. Thinking he has killed the policeman, he runs away in a panic. His journey takes him from Haifa to the Syrian border, where he finally finds physical and emotional haven on a kibbutz (collective farm).

In his screenplay, Michael Blankfort has wisely lopped away some of the over-melodramatic incidents of his 1952 novel to create a convincing chase story with vivid topographical and psychological landscapes. Kirk Douglas in the title role makes an affecting individual of the D.P. in flight from the law and himself. He is alternately cocky and wisecracking, lonely and obsessed by fears. As Yael, the sabra (native-born Israeli) girl who comes to love the juggler and helps set him on the road to recovery, Italian Actress Milly Vitale is a plumply pretty figure dressed in shorts and lugging a rifle. The lesser characters are sharply realized and Director Edward Dmytryk ably blends harsh action and atmospheric mood. In great, racking closeups, his camera brutally captures the juggler's claustrophobic concentration-camp memories. It also "makes a lyrical sequence out of an Israeli folk dance around a kibbutz campfire.

The President's Lady (20th Century-Fox). The life of President Andrew Jackson (1767-1845) was made to order for the movies. He rose from Tennessee backwoodsman and lawyer to be elected seventh President of the U.S. in 1828. He raced horses, fought Indians, was as handy with a gun as with a legal brief. Mostly, this film biography looks at Jackson (Charlton Heston) through the eyes of his wife (Susan Hayward). When Rachel Donelson Robards married Jackson, there was a legal error about her divorce from her first husband. Two years later, when the error was discovered, Jackson and Rachel were remarried. But Rachel Jackson was often the object of slanderous gossip (Jackson fought duels to defend her honor), and during his campaign for the presidency, his political enemies called her an adulteress. Although she died before Jackson was inaugurated, she lived to hear the news of his election.

Based on Irving Stone's bestselling 1951 biographical novel, the picture hews fairly closely to historical fact; and, unlike most movie biographies of famous men, it has more than its share of legitimate adventure. But in its writing, direction and acting, it comes out as a too-slick biographical film. Susan Hayward makes a glamorous Mrs. Jackson even when she is smoking a pipe (as she did in real life), and she grows old becomingly. As Jackson, Charlton Heston is as dashing a figure in or out of politics as any moviegoer could wish. Only in the final scenes, when he ages, does he acquire the familiar shaggy, roughhewn look of Old Hickory.

Rome 11 O'Clock (Paul Graetz; Times Film Corp.) was inspired by a real happening in Rome in 1951. The picture tells of 200 job-hungry girls who show up in response to a want ad for one stenographer. As they wait in line, the office building stairway on which they are standing collapses under their combined weight. The movie focuses on several of the girls, e.g., the daughter of a rich family who is in love with a poor artist, a streetwalker trying to get honest employment, a stenographer who has been seduced by her former employer.

Much of this material needlessly piles extra melodrama on the movie's sufficiently melodramatic subject so that the picture at times almost collapses from its own plot weight. Director & Co-Author Giuseppi (Bitter Rice) De Santis also injects an extraordinary amount of sex appeal into his picture, notably by having the better part of the 200 attractive accident victims strewed about on the collapsed staircase in various states of fetching disarray. But underneath all this excessive color, the picture has a hard bedrock of realism that props it up dramatically: it is an earnest, often eloquent indictment of social conditions that can lead to such a disaster in the first place. The moral is underlined at the end. After the last accident victim has been removed, one of the girls again lines up in front of the building, waiting for morning to apply for the job that has not been filled.

Paris Express (Raymond Stress; George Schaefer), a British movie version of French Novelist Georges Simenon's The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By, is a Technicolored slice of European low life. It tells of a dull, respectable Dutch bookkeeper (Claude Rains) who catches his boss (Herbert Lom) running out with embezzled company money. In the scuffle, the employer is accidentally killed, and the bookkeeper, tempted by the financial windfall, runs off to Paris with the funds. There he takes up with a shady lady (Marta Toren) and has his one big fling before the police close in on him.

In the process of being transferred to the screen, the Simenon novel has lost not only its original title but also much of its point. The book, in examining human frailty under stress, was an incisive study of abnormal psychology. Claude Rains's stiff performance and some thoroughly normal moviemaking turn the picture into a routine chase yarn.

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