The New Pictures

Night People (20th Century-Fox). Razzle-dazzle, the art of hitting them where they ain't, has helped many a runt to make a winning score. This picture is a case in point. When Writer-Producer-Director Nunnally Johnson started his play, there was nothing very surprising in it: it was the safe old Berlin thriller-chase routine about an East zone kidnaping and West zone attempts to recover the fumble. But then Johnson started to call some fancy signals.

The first surprise: a spectacular but somewhat deceptive shift to the left. When a U.S. soldier is kidnaped, his father (Broderick Crawford), a rampant capitalist with high connections in Washington, makes a stratoline for Berlin to "get some action" out of the military-government bureaucrats stationed there. For a little while--as the big businessman blabbers influentially in the press club and blubbers helplessly under the withering word-fire of an intelligence officer (Gregory Peck) who dares to use his intelligence--the picture is strongly reminiscent of a leftish political cartoon from the '30s in which a hog in striped pants is served up with an apple in his mouth.

While the shock of his left feint is taking hold, Johnson suddenly sends his plot around right end. The capitalist turns out to have a heart after all (though it does not begin to beat until he sees a woman who reminds him of his wife attempt suicide with strychnine rather than face a Russian interrogation), and the Russians are vigorously presented as heels. Johnson's political gambit is fairly daring to have been executed in Hollywood, 1953; and it may serve, if the picture is a box-office success, to remind moviemakers that there is still no law against unpopular opinions.

The really remarkable thing about Night People is the skillful visual patter with which Johnson, working like a shrewd real-estate salesman, hurries the audience past the gaps and imperfections in his property and closes the sale before they quite know what they have bought. For no particular reason, doors open and shut in the moviegoer's face with bewildering frequency. Unnecessary characters rush in to firm up every soft spot with a bit of business.

After 95 minutes of following such razzle-dazzle from end to end of the big CinemaScope field, an audience may begin to wonder whether it has been cleverly entertained or cynically worked over. However, Moviemaker Johnson can make one feel that it is almost a privilege to be worked over by a champ.

Nunnally Johnson, who describes Night People as "Dick Tracy in Berlin," has been writing screenplays since 1932, producing them since 1936. Until Night People came along, he was content with the dual job, making a variety of well-turned pictures in a variety of styles (The Grapes of Wrath, Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back, How to Marry a Millionaire). Then, says Johnson, 56, "I got the impulse to direct. I said to [20th Century-Fox Boss Darryl] Zanuck: 'What about directing Night Peopled Zanuck said, 'What will Peck say?' " Johnson checked with Actor Peck. "He looked kind of startled and said, 'Why not?' So I became a director."

Like most screenwriters, Johnson had a generally poor opinion of directors, who must necessarily play editor with the writer's lines. He once observed of a director that his most important function was to stay on the set to see that the actors didn't go home too early. Even now, after his first try in that job, Johnson still feels strongly that the story is the important thing.

Johnson will soon be ready to work on his second triple-duty film, The Man Who Never Was. Says he: "I'll direct anything except big pictures with Biblical costumes. I only write pictures where people wear pants, not togas. Give me two or three people in a room and I'm all right. But 182 people coming over a hill --I'm not the boy for that."

Saskatchewan (Universal-International). The only difference between this and any other western--a few degrees of latitude--turns out to make quite a difference. The escapes and chases are reeled out against some of the world's most emphatic scenery, the lake country of the Canadian northwest, and the camera stares at it as appreciatively as a dead-end kid at his first cow.

The white peaks piercing up abstractly through the smoke-green pine woods, the lakes that lie among them cold and blue as fallen stars, the speckless skies as they blow grandly over everything--all this has been beautifully caught by Cameraman John Seitz in satisfying Technicolor.

The story, however, is just a plain tourist. It tells what happened after the Sioux crushed General Custer at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. They rode north into Canada and tried to raise the Cree against the white man. They would have succeeded, too, according to this movie, if Alan Ladd had not stopped being a Paratrooper (TIME, Jan. 11) in time to save Canada with one hand and Shelley Winters with the other.

The glamour of Actor Ladd's achievement--he dashes into the enemy camp alone and persuades the Cree to refuse the blandishments of the Sioux--is some what marred by a curious miscasting among the extras. Ladd plays a Mountie named Sergeant O'Rourke, and as he stares around the circle of hostile Indians, only a very young moviegoer will believe that he is really in any danger from all those pleasant Irish faces.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.