The New Pictures

The Eddy Duchin Story (Columbia) continues the succession of reverent film biographies of U.S. musicmakers without varying the dependable formula of Boy seeks Fame, Boy gets Fame, Boy realizes Fame isn't everything.

As told in the movie, Pianist Eddy Duchin's way in the world was singularly easy. He arrived breathless in Manhattan, and, within minutes, had a job in Leo Reisman's band at the old Central Park Casino, and was launched on a successful career that continued without impediment. With equal speed, he met, wooed and wed socially prominent Marjorie Oelrichs, and was instantly accepted by her friends and relatives.

In fact, the only tragedy in Duchin's life was death, a subject that Hollywood ordinarily does not like to contemplate with seriousness. Duchin's bride died in childbirth, and Eddy had scarcely recovered from the shock when he learned that he was afflicted with leukemia. The film suggests that he had no consolations, either of religion or philosophy, to help him face imminent extinction. Except for some murmured complaints about how unfair "They" are in arranging man's fate, the problem was resolved entirely in terms of how and when Eddy should tell his son and prospective second wife about his condition.

Tyrone Power plays Eddy with unflagging boyishness, and Kim Novak acts the doomed Marjorie Oelrichs with spectral intimations ("Hold me, Eddy; I'm afraid of the wind . . ."). This blowy motif runs throughout the film: death's advent is always heralded by wind-driven snow, rain or autumn leaves. A stately newcomer, Australia's Victoria Shaw, is introduced as Duchin's second wife, and a pair of clipped-accented moppets (Mickey Maga and Rex Thompson) perform as the Duchin child at different ages. Moviegoers may enjoy the rippling piano notes (actually played by Carmen Cavallaro) that made Duchin a society favorite during the '30s, and there is one pleasant scene in which Power plays a duet with a small Chinese boy during his wartime tour of duty as operations officer of a destroyer flotilla.

That Certain Feeling (Paramount) is a movie adaptation of the 1954 Broadway hit, King of Hearts, by Jean Kerr and Eleanor Brooke, a comedy that screened its thin plot behind an electrical display of wisecracks. Hollywood has added twice as many writers (Norman Panama, Melvin Frank, I.A.L. Diamond, William Altman) and got a corresponding increase in plot and even a few more jokes.

As a Bob Hope vehicle, the film has its points. Bob is pictured as a ne'er-do-well cartoonist and psychopathic coward who has turned to an analyst for help because Bromo Seltzer has failed him. Reduced to painting nudes on ties and landscapes on the backs of turtles, Hope is visited in his garret by a dazzling blonde (Eva Marie Saint) who used to be his wife and is now engaged to George Sanders, a moneyed comic-strip artist whose ego contains more hot air than a Turkish bath.

Her proposition: that Bob move in as Sanders' ghost artist while she and the cartoonist are off on their honeymoon. Additional comedy is supplied by Pearl Bailey, who doubles as narrator and songbird when she is not pretending to be Sanders' maid, as well as by a small boy (Jerry Mathers) and a large shaggy dog. With this much to go on, Hope sets about rewinning Eva Marie with all the tested ingredients of farce, from pratfalls to bedroom scenes to hurry-up exits and entrances. Everything winds up in a final bedlam as Cartoonist Sanders' apartment is being readied for a Person to Person TV interview at the same moment that Eva Marie is breaking her engagement and Hope is walking off, not only with the girl, but with the boy and dog as well. Bob breezes amiably through this pastiche, firing off salvos of one-line jokes, mugging happily, and milking his nervous stomach and faint heart for every sight gag possible. Eva Marie Saint is mostly limited to wearing high-fashion clothes and looking elegant, but, in the drunk scene, she exhibits a comedy talent of her own--especially in a Groucho-like gallop that definitely hits the Marx.

The Searchers (C. V. Whitney; Warner) is another excursion into the patented Old West of Director John Ford. The place is Texas, three years after the Civil War, and the lone figure moving across the vast plain is none other than lean, leathery, disenchanted John Wayne, still wearing bits of his Confederate uniform, still looking for trouble. Trouble finds him. One day, while John's back is turned, Chief Scar and his wild Comanches swoop down and massacre his relatives, carrying off two young girls for their own fell purposes.

Wayne promptly fills his trusty horse with hay and sets off on a fiveyear, Technicolor, VistaVision search for the girls. His itinerary sounds like that of Lewis & Clark, but the camera never seems to get outside Arizona and Utah's beautiful Monument Valley. Tagging along is Jeffrey Hunter, who spends nearly as much time trying to soften Wayne's vindictiveness as he does hunting Indians. Though the film runs for two hours, it nevertheless races through its individual scenes at so breakneck a pace that moviegoers may be uncertain just what is going on. Director Ford indulges his Homeric appetite for violence of spirit and action. Coming on the corpse of a hated Comanche, Wayne shoots out the dead man's eyes on the debatable theological principle that the Indian's blinded ghost cannot find its way to the Happy Hunting Grounds.

One of the kidnaped girls is raped by four braves and killed off early in the picture. The other (Natalie Wood), when finally found, proves to be a contented member of Chief Scar's harem. Wayne is so annoyed that he tries to shoot her dead and is only thwarted by an Indian attack.

The lapses in logic and the general air of incoherence are only minor imperfections in a film as carefully contrived as a matchstick castle. The Searchers is rousingly played by what Hollywood calls the "John Ford Stock Company"--a group made up of Wayne, Harry Carey Jr., Ward Bond, a half-dozen bit players, seven stunt men who are repeatedly shot off horses, and many of the same Navajo Indians who have been losing battles in John Ford pictures since 1938. By now, all of them perform with practiced ease: the women know just where to stand on the cabin porch as they peer off anxiously into the haze and mesa-filled distances; the men automatically fall into line for a barn dance or a posse. In fact, they may be getting too practiced and familiar. Even John Wayne seems to have done it once too often as he makes his standardized, end-of-film departure into the sunset.

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