The New Pictures

The Harder They Fall (Columbia). When Budd Schulberg wrote the novel from which this picture is drawn, he hoped it might prove to be a sort of Uncle Tom's Cabin of the fight racket, a body blow to one of the least savory survivals of slavery in U.S. society: the tradition of the chattel athlete. Author Schulberg hit hard, but he was striking at bulletproof-vested interests, and in the nine years since he made his attack, these interests (on evidence adduced in recent investigations) seem to have grown even stronger. This picture will not seriously weaken them, but it will hang a terrific mouse on the public eye.

Schulberg's story is, with scarcely any disguise, the Primo Carnera story. Like the onetime (1933-34) heavyweight champion, Toro Moreno ("El Toro, the wild man of the Andes") is a big country bumpkin who stands 6 ft. 7 3/4 in., weighs 285 Ibs., and serves his opponents a punch that would scarcely be too stiff for a six-year-old's birthday party. Like Carnera, El Toro (touchingly portrayed by Wrestler Mike Lane) falls among thieves. A well-known gambler and fixologist named Nick Benko (played good and heavy by Rod Steiger) buys up his contract and starts to fatten the Bull for the kill.

And that's where the hero (Humphrey Bogart) comes in. Sportswriter Bogart is all too ready to reach for the folding money, even if he has to get his hands a little dirty. Nick offers him 10% of Toro's take to handle the big bum.

The ballyhoo begins: the buildup in the back country, the tank artists and local strongmen, the charm where it works and the arm when they ask for it, the planted puffs in the big metropolitan dailies, the careful suckering of suspicious reporters, the old rah-rah for the worthy causes. And then all at once the first big fight, and a piece of good luck that money couldn't buy: the ex-champ, punch-drunk from his last big beating, dies in the hospital after the big boy takes him--just as Ernie Schaaf died after his 1933 fight with Carnera. Toro, a thousand headlines shout, is a killer! The story guarantees a great gate for the title fight.

Comes another hitch. The champ (Max Baer) gets sore at some of Bogart's publicity, refuses to play along with Benko's boy. "Carry him for six rounds," Benko begs. "You don't want to louse up the film rights." Baer refuses, and what happens next is a ghastly digest of the 1934 fight, in which Baer gave Carnera the most brutal beating he ever took (eleven knockdowns in eleven rounds), and won the heavyweight championship. The eleven rounds are condensed into several of the most savage minutes seen on screen in recent years, and when they are over, the ring looks like a butcher's block.

The climax, however, comes next day. Bogart goes over to Benko's place to pick up his boy's purse. After the bossman's deductions are made, it comes to exactly $49.07. "Fighters," somebody remarks with a self-satisfied leer, "are dirt."

The Man Who Knew Too Much (Paramount), a remake by Alfred Hitchcock of his 1935 thriller, is almost buried beneath the weight of Technicolor, Vista-Vision and an endless Storm Cloud Cantata performed by the London Symphony Orchestra and the Covent Garden Chorus. Indulging his taste for contrast, Hitchcock takes an American family--so glossily normal that it might have popped out of a refrigerator advertisement--and sets it down in the eternal grime of Marrakech, Morocco. The family: Jimmy Stewart, a surgeon from Indianapolis; Doris Day, his songbird wife; Christopher Olsen, their typically cute son who thinks North Africa looks just like Las Vegas.

Stewart, as a puppy-friendly tourist, is soon pals with a jolly Frenchman (Daniel Gelin) and a pair of tweedy Britons (Bernard Mills and Brenda de Banzie). Doris is more suspicious: she thinks the Frenchman asks too many questions and that the Britons are just a little shifty-eyed. And what about the mysterious stranger with the death's-head face? Did he really knock at their hotel-room door by mistake? Even Jimmy realizes that something is up when Gelin, disguised as an Arab, comes staggering into the marketplace with a knife stuck in his back, and gasps out a dying warning that a political assassination will soon be attempted in London.

Stewart cannot tell the police this news because the conspirators have kidnaped his son to ensure his silence. The film slips smoothly into a Hitchcock chase sequence as Jimmy and Doris charge off to London to track down the kidnapers: there is a melee in a taxidermist's shop, an encounter with the villains in a Non conformist chapel, a hand-to-hand struggle with the gun-wielding assassin in a velvet-curtained box at Albert Hall, a final showdown in the gilt-and-mirror splendor of a foreign embassy. Hitchcock alternates his chills with comedy, as when Jimmy is bitten by a stuffed tiger, and gets deft performances from both Stewart and Doris Day. But the pace grows laggard toward the end. Instead of using music as a background for action, Hitchcock moves it up front, and moviegoers must sit still not only for the dismayingly long cantata but also for special numbers sung by Doris Day. The chief drawback of these musical stage-waits is that they allow the audience to think back over the story and conclude that it doesn't make much sense.

Hilda Crane (20th Century-Fox) was originally a series of short stories about an aging and raddled Manhattan career girl who tries to settle down to the straight and narrow in her old home town. In 1950 Author Samson Raphaelson adapted his theme to a Broadway play, starring Jessica Tandy as the lady who finds an overdose of sleeping pills easier to take than smalltown living.

Hollywood rings a few changes on the plot. Hard-luck Hilda (Jean Simmons) is only 22 when, "surfeited with the wrong kind of love," she comes home to mother after running through two husbands and an unspecified number of lovers. But things are tough at home too. Mama (Judith Evelyn) gets a faraway look whenever Hilda begins blithering about life. And rascally Jean Pierre Aumont wants to bed her, not wed her. True enough, wealthy Guy Madison has honorable intentions, but Hilda thinks he is something of a cluck. She marries him, anyway, only to have Guy's meanly suspicious mother take her revenge by dying of a heart attack.

Hilda makes the stunned discovery that, because of Guy's queasy feelings about his departed mother, she has been trapped into what the tabloids call a "kissless" marriage. So. naturally, Hilda turns for solace to lecherous Jean Pierre. When Guy surprises them in their love nest, he is upset and punches Aumont on the jaw. Hilda goes reeling home for her handful of pills, but--naturally--Guy gets there in time to call for a stomach pump, and tells Hilda he is dreadfully sorry about the whole thing.

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