The New Pictures

Ransom! (M-G-M). The ransom that is intended to purchase the life of a kidnaped child is more likely to buy his death. The logic of this statement is inescapable: with the cash in hand, the criminals no longer need the child alive for possible use as an instrument of extortion, and in fact they are much better off with him dead if he is old enough to bear witness against them. Furthermore, a kidnaper faces the death penalty in many states, so what difference does a murder make?

Logic, however, is one thing; feelings are quite another. What parent would have the nerve to call a kidnaper's bluff--to play, in effect, a game of poker with his own child's life? Ransom! is the story of a man who had the nerve. Based on a popular television play by Cyril Hume and Richard Maibaum, it is a fairly conventional thriller that says, in substance, something much better than conventional about the truth, and how dreadful is the operation by which it makes a man free.

When his eight-year-old son (Bobby Clark) is kidnaped, a wealthy manufacturer (Glenn Ford) raises the $500,000 ransom that the crooks require, but before he hands the money over, he has time to consider the facts of the matter. After a fierce inner struggle, his head rules his heart. He takes TV time to tell the criminals his decision: that they will never get a cent from him, and that, moreover, if the child is not turned loose unharmed, he will post the whole half million as a reward for their capture.

That tears it. Newscasters deplore his decision; newspapers revile it. A storm of telegrams protests his heartlessness. A mob gathers threateningly outside his house. His brother turns against him, his wife leaves home. Then the police arrive with his son's bloody T shirt.

At this terrible moment the film says something big and dark and quiet about the weight of fate; the pity is that it goes on to make the usual Shubert finish about the might of right.

Shack Out on 101 (Broidy; Allied Artists) confronts the U.S. motorist--already reduced to a walleyed wreck by the massed assault of saturation traffic, maladjusted headlights, homicidal hitchhikers, kids on bikes, the hydramatic wheeze, small-town radar cops and the finance company -- with a new and yet more fiendish horror of the highway: the Communist-controlled hamburger stand.

Take, for instance, the short-order cook at the "shack" in this picture, the one they all call Slob (Lee Marvin). He looks as if he never did anything more subversive than add a slice of forefinger to the chicken salad, but his name is Mr. Gregory, and his game is dirtier than his sandwich board. He steals U.S. scientists and ships them to Russia.

Clearly he must be stopped. The FBI (Frank Lovejoy) moves in, but the FBI these days, as every moviegoer has reason to believe, is more interested in getting its woman than its man. Agent Lovejoy keeps putting the arm on the counter girl (Terry Moore) instead of on the spy, which leaves Slob with nothing to do, through most of the picture, but make sandwiches. And yet, Actor Marvin, who is easily the most repulsive object that Hollywood has dug up in recent years, is such a skillful performer that when he starts hacking away at a bacon-lettuce-and-tomato on toast, the spectator has all the visceral sensations of watching an MVD interrogator go to work on an enemy of the people. As for most of the other players, they might do worse than accept the advice that one of them snarls at another: "Quit acting!"

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