The New Pictures

Paratrooper (Columbia) gains some freshness as a war picture by having Alan Ladd go through his deadpan heroics as a member of the British army. Ex-U.S. Captain Ladd pretends to be a Canadian and volunteers as a private in the paratroops. He soon learns that, no matter what uniform they wear, noncoms are noncoms, and spends a fortnight in the stockade for slugging his corporal in a barroom brawl. But the picture soon demonstrates that it intends to be different: one of the tough top kicks, showing his squad how easy it is to bail out of a plane, plummets sickeningly to his death because his parachute fails to open. The other noncoms meet equally grim fates: the scrappy corporal loses both feet in an airborne raid on occupied France, and the regimental sergeant major dies in the North African invasion.

Paratrooper Ladd obdurately refuses a commission (his reason: as a U.S. officer he once ordered a friend to jump and the friend died), but his reluctance to be a leader is finally overcome in battle when the paratroopers, successfully dodging the Nazis in the desert, blunder into a minefield. Newcomer Susan Stephen makes an appealing foil for Ladd: she is peppery enough in the early reels, and sufficiently soft in time for the clinch. The Technicolor is generally excellent. Leo Genn, as a spit & polish British major, has an amusing scene; encountering the informal crew of a U.S. bomber, he snaps to attention, explains: "I just thought someone ought to salute somebody around here."

Heidi (United Artists) is pretty well taken care of in the words of a six-year-old boy who saw the picture. "It got sad in the middle," he said, "but it happiered at the end." The suggestion of a fallen cake, sunk under the weight of its unassimilated sugar, fits Lazar Wechsler's film as well as Johanna Spyri's book (here done in film for the second time), but young children will probably like the one as well as they do the other. Heidi herself is freshly, simply played by Elsbeth Sigmund, and her crusty grandfather is done brown by Heinrick Gretler.

King of the Khyber Rifles (20th Century-Fox) may be the first CinemaScope production to justify a recent Hollywood wisecrack: "The wider they come the harder they flop." King is a routine Tyrone Power costume adventure set in 1857. Spread out on the enormous CinemaScope screen, it forces the actors to shout love at each other about as intimately as opponents on a tennis court, and the audience gets a neck ache following the conversational ball.

The story about a British hill station in northern India has a familiar set of char acters: the new officer (Power), the commander's daughter (Terry Moore), and her father (Michael Rennie), who refuses consent--in this case because Ty is a half-caste. "Don't you mind when people behave the way they do?" pouts Actress Moore, an ingenue who seems continually worried by the complexity of her lines. "I mind, but I hope for the best. The world's still young," replies Actor Power, managing to look a little like Nehru and John Barrymore at the same time. Yes, the twain meet in the end.

King is the third CinemaScope picture in a row (How to Marry a Millionaire, Beneath the Twelve-Mile Reef) with a five-word title. Perhaps someone has decided that big titles along with a big screen will convince the public that it will see a big picture. This one, however, suggests a prompt use for what might otherwise have seemed the most foolish invention of the week--a device, announced by Joseph and Irving Tushinsky in Hollywood, that can take a CinemaScope picture, pumped up at great cost to two times normal size, and deflate it.

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