The New Pictures

We're No Angels (Paramount) began life three years ago as a modest French farce by Albert Husson; adapted by Playwrights Sam and Bella Spewack, it became a hit on Broadway, and is still running in London and Australia. Now the fable about three Devil's Island convicts who put their illegal talents to work for an inept but honest businessman turns up in VistaVision, starring Humphrey Bogart, Aldo Ray and Peter Ustinov.

The highly colored, overwhimsical film version suffers because Director Michael Curtiz seems unable to decide whether he is reading from a fairy tale or a police blotter. Sometimes the archness is laid on with a trowel, sometimes the trifling action stops dead for overdetailed explanations. Bogart plays his role pretty straight; Aldo Ray is disconcertingly elfin for an alleged sex fiend; and Ustinov's mugging seems overdone. Basil Rathbone and John Baer wander onscreen long enough to look properly villainous. Joan Bennett and Gloria Talbott add their pretty confusions to the artificial turmoil. Technicolor gives the picture a fairly handsome mounting, but nothing can rescue the story from too much talk and too little zip.

Mr. Roberts (Warner) should be one of the biggest moneymakers of the year. It combines a sure-fire story, the honest-Injun appeal of Henry Fonda, and a bagful of tried and true comedy situations. Based on the long-run Broadway hit by Joshua Logan and the late Thomas Heggen, the film gains much from the CinemaScope opportunity to catch the horizon sweeps of the broad Pacific, the majestic overwater parade of a task force, and the sky-filling explosions of ocean dawns and sunsets.

The action takes place on the snail-paced Navy supply ship Reluctant, carrying unvital but necessary cargo, from toothpaste to toilet paper, to all the safe island harbors between Tedium and Apathy. But what moviegoers see is less a ship than a floating prep school: Captain James Cagney is as fussy, opinionated and domineering as any self-seeking headmaster; Henry Fonda, the cargo officer who continually sighs to be in combat, fills the role of a young Mr. Chips; the crew's schoolboy pranks are only thinly disguised as adult antics. Even when the sailors, with binoculars glued to their eyes, are squirming with delight at the glimpse of a nurse taking a shower, it is merely boyish high spirits rather than voyeurism. Similarly, an unexpected shore leave on the island of Elysium has no more reality than the island's name: though the crew is alleged to have got drunk and disorderly, to have broken up a dinner-dance, disrobed six of the town's debutantes, sacked the home of the--French governor--under the impression that it was a brothel--and put 38 soldiers in the hospital, there is never a hint of malicious mischief in their fun. A soft reprimand from Fonda is sufficient to calm the most riotous of them.

To win shore leave for the crew. Fonda has to promise Cagney he will end both his insubordination and his efforts to get into combat. The crew, not knowing he has turned submissive for their sakes, sullenly spurn Fonda until they accidentally learn the truth. Then, through mass action and a spot of forgery, they achieve his fondest dream by getting him transferred to a destroyer in action off Okinawa. Thus, Mr. Roberts follows the classic Hollywood boy-meets-girl formula. Only, in this case, it runs : Fonda meets crew, Fonda loses crew, Fonda gets crew.

The acting, direction (by John Ford and Mervyn LeRoy) and writing have all the high surface polish and potent inward efficiency of a 1955 car fresh from the assembly line. Fonda, enlarging on his stage performance, has caught every nuance appropriate to the nation's big brother; William Powell, as the ship's doctor, is endlessly kind, beneficent and wise; Jack Lemmon proves once more that he is easily the most engaging of Hollywood's new comedians, and James Cagney makes his jack-in-the-box appearances with all of the peppery rancor of a Mr. Punch. The best evidence of the film's accomplishment is that Mr. Roberts seldom drags during its more than two hours' running time.

For Producer Leland Hayward, Mr. Roberts is the first of a package of three movies. Next is The Spirit of St. Louis, starring Jimmy Stewart as Charles Lindbergh; it will be followed by Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, with Spencer Tracy playing the ancient Cuban mariner who catches the big marlin. Hayward. 52, is a lean, tense, much-married (four times) entrepreneur who spends most of his waking hours making business and social calls on the long distance phone. Nebraska-born and the son of a judge who was later a federal district attorney in New York, Hayward quit Princeton in his sophomore year, has since been an agent for writers and actors, an airline executive, the founder of a school for training World War II pilots, and a successful Broadway producer (State of the Union, Mr. Roberts, South Pacific). Recently ill, Hayward is now working in Hollywood because he feels it is less physically demanding: "Movies are slower than television--slower than the theater, for that matter." But not even film-making is without its problems. Midway in Mr. Roberts, Veteran Director John (The Informer) Ford was rushed off for an emergency operation, had to be hurriedly replaced by Mervyn LeRoy. Hayward is also encountering some heavy seas in his preliminary work on The Spirit of St. Louis.

Since it is being shot in color, none of the black-and-white newsreel footage of Lindbergh's flight can be used. Director Billy Wilder is also having trouble with his aerial shots of St. Louis and Manhattan because the rooftops of both cities are covered with anachronistic TV antennas. Complains Hayward: "It's a tough picture to make because you have history fighting you every step of the way."

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