The New Pictures

Fanfan the Tulip (Filmsonor; Lopert Films) is a legendary French hero who, to judge from this picture, was a sort of combination Robin Hood and Roy Rogers. During the reign of Louis XV, Fanfan (Gerard Philipe) has enough romantic adventures for a couple of action movies: he makes love to the king's pretty daughter and to the voluptuous daughter of a recruiting sergeant, rescues the Marquise de Pompadour from highway robbers, escapes from the hangman's noose by the skin of his profile, brings about the surrender of France's enemies on the battle field by capturing their general staff singlehanded.

With its royalty and rogues, affairs of state and of heart, and conquests military and romantic, Fanfan the Tulip bulges with color. Gerard (Devil in the Flesh) Philipe bounces through the title role with zest, leaping from balconies, rooftops and cliffs with the greatest of ease, riding a white charger to the rescue of fair damsels, besting his enemies with fists, swords and guns and altogether making an entirely likable scamp. As the main object of his affections, Italian Actress Gina Lollobrigida is so shapely that she seems to bulge from the screen in the best 3-D style. Directed with sly relish by Christian-Jaque, Fanfan the Tulip is an enjoyable French costume western and a witty spoof of the typical movie swashbuckler.

Ring Around the Clock (Sonio Coletti; International Film Associates), inspired by a 1947 TIME story titled A Clock for Fiumicino, tells of the frictions that arise between right and left political factions as a little Italian fishing village goes about repairing its war-bombed town clock. Peace is finally restored to the community when the clock is unveiled. The movie was shot in 1950, not in Fiumicino, where political tensions were too acute, but in the ancient town of Terracina (pop. 15,600). The movie introduces a minor romantic subplot involving a pretty schoolteacher and a Popular Frontist, but is otherwise generally faithful to the original news story. Directed with an earthy flavor by

Paolo Tamburella, the result is an amiable, ingratiating human comedy with overtones of A Bell for Adano and The Little World of Don Camilla.

Supporting the professional performers in their leading roles are approximately 800 of Terracina's citizens, who go about their acting jobs with relish. Good musical touch: the satirical score that blares out from the screen at intervals, entirely drowning out the strident, arm-waving speechifying of the antagonists.

Split Second (Edmund Grainger; RKO Radio) seems to be a dramatic chip off Robert Sherwood's 1935 play, The Petrified Forest. It tells of a desperado who holds a group of strangers at gunpoint mercy, but it adds an up-to-date plot switch: the action takes place in a Nevada ghost town located in a restricted testing-ground area where an atom bomb is about to go off.

Trapped between gunman and bomb, the captives sweat it out through all sorts of minor melodramatic outbursts: two of the hostages unsuccessfully try to knife and shoot the desperado (Stephen Mc-Nally); a doctor (Richard Egan) performs an emergency operation on the gunman's wounded pal (Paul Kelly); the doctor's spoiled wife (Alexis Smith) sees her lover (Robert Paige) shot to death; love comes to a hard-boiled nightclub entertainer (Jan Sterling) and a reporter (Keith Andes).

With its tried & true basic plot, Split Second was bound to work up a certain amount of grim suspense. In addition, Stephen McNally's characterization of the convict is a snarlingly powerful one. But much of the movie's intrinsic excitement is lost in its over-plotting and in the under-direction of Actor Dick Powell in his first directorial job.

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