The New Pictures

Daddy Long Legs (20th Century-Fox) is being breathlessly touted by the publicists as the picture in which Leslie Caron "for the first time bares her forehead." As a matter of fact, when the bangs are brushed back, the lady's forehead looks just about like everybody else's. Still and all, it is probably the most unusual thing about this picture.

The third movie made from Jean Webster's bestselling novel (1912) and hit play (1914), Daddy Long Legs is the first to set the story to music (by Johnny Mercer and Alex North). The saccharine story: a wealthy, middle-aged American (Fred Astaire) takes a fancy to a pretty young French orphan (Leslie Caron) and decides to pay her way through college in the U.S. Lest philanthropy be thought philandering, he keeps his identity a secret. Leslie knows him only from his shadow, seen once in an odd light, as "Daddy Long Legs." However, there is nothing more certain in Hollywood than the fact that to the man who pays the bill belongs the coo.

Fred and Leslie dance pretty well separately, but when they get together the ballerina looks about as comfortable in a two-step as Fred would in a tutu. The show has its moments, though. "Am I leading?" asks a muscular young woman Fred is dancing with. "No," he replies, breathing hard. "I think it's a tie." For the art lovers, there is a scene in which the camera respectfully inspects a series of paintings, genuine originals, by Jean Baptiste Corot, Raoul Dufy, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso and Claudette Colbert.

Heartbreak Ridge (Tudor Pictures) is a rare piece of work by any standards. Filmed in color (with English narration) under the auspices of France's Ministry of Defense, Heartbreak tells the story of the famed French battalion in Korea. The soldiers of the battalion are the cast, the actual 1952 battleground is the setting. The director and a cameraman were wounded by Communist fire while filming it. Not since John Huston's San Pietro (1945) has a film shown in the U.S. come so close to capturing the painful reality of foxhole war.

But for all its this-is-how-it-really-was quality, Heartbreak is far more than a newsreel. It threads its story on the trial-by-fire of young Lieut. Gerard Garcet, a replacement starch-fresh from St. Cyr. At first Career Officer Garcet learns a basic lesson--war is mostly waiting.

At last, with spring, comes the call to action. Garcet takes the long jeep ride into combat, full of zeal and professional hopes ("Promotions do not come to young lieutenants promenading on the Champs Elysees"). He soon learns that he is the New Boy at the Old School; his fellow officers reminisce about when the war was really tough; his hard-bitten platoon promptly dubs him "Battling Baby-Face."

It takes Freshman Garcet several lonely months before he breaks through to acceptance, and he does it the hard way. In a successful dawn attack on a Chinese hill position, much of his platoon is wiped out, and he is badly wounded. Back in the aid station, he hears from a dying platoon member the first words of greeting, eloquent in their sense of sudden loss: "I wish I had gotten to know you better."

Heartbreak's strength comes partly from Director Jacques Dupont's almost matter-of-fact attention to reinforcing detail: a mustached machine-gunner tensely wetting his lips as he waits for his comrades to advance; the primitive clutter of a front-line trench. It flashes with moments of strange, sunlit beauty that almost belie the shocking truth of man diligently preoccupied with killing man. There are also lighter moments--with Gallic, wine-happy R & Rs (Rest and Recuperators) in Japan. But Director Dupont never strays far from the terrible business that carried him, the French battalion and the tens of thousands of other U.N. soldiers into combat in Korea.

The deeper heartbreak, as Lieut. Garcet learns, lies not in the infantryman's Iliad of anguish and backbreaking toil at the bloody Korean ridge. It lies in the bitter knowledge that at home the sacrifice has largely gone unnoticed. For France's "les oublies" (forgotten ones) and for all the others who went to Korea, Heartbreak Ridge is both a stirring reminder and an epitaph.

Interrupted Melody (M-G-M). The Salk vaccine, which prevents infantile paralysis, will probably bring out, in reaction, a low-grade rash of films like this one. If ignored, they will go away. Based on the autobiography of Marjorie Lawrence, the Metropolitan Opera star who was stricken with the disease in 1941 but came back in 1943 to sing Venus from a sitting position, Interrupted Melody is a poliopera in color. For three-fourths of the picture, Singer Lawrence (played by Eleanor Parker, sung by Eileen Farrell) vivaciously eludes the clutches of one hairy tenor after another in scenes from Carmen, La Boheme, II Trovatore and Samson et Dalila. In the final fourth, with the loyal support of her husband (Glenn Ford), she grimly fights off her affliction. Somehow, the film trails vaguely away from the sense of real-life sorrow and courage which inspired it. Instead, the audience is left with a tantalizing impression that if the heroine had stopped singing and stayed home with her husband as a good wife should, she would never have got sick--and this movie would never have been made.

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