The New Pictures

A Face in the Crowd (Newtown; Warner) is the sort of cure that almost makes the disease desirable, even when the disease is as painful as the commercial phoniness that currently afflicts some parts of U.S. culture. The doctor in this case is Elia Kazan, a well-known specialist in social disorders who made On the Waterfront and Baby Doll and has directed three of Tennessee Williams' plays. Unhappily Kazan does not seem to know the first thing about a satiric operation. As Lady Mary Wortley Montagu explained the technique: "Satire should, like a polished razor keen/ Wound with a touch that's scarcely felt or seen." She also described Kazan's method: "Thine is an oyster knife, that hacks and hews;/ The rage, but not the talent, to abuse."

Rage is Kazan's undoing. He hacks and hews with such ill-considered fury that the patient soon becomes a mere victim and the satire falls to pieces. The victim (Andy Griffith) is a big-time TV entertainer, a professional yokel. Behind his hawg-trough grin stands a greedy and brutal hog, but the public cannot see the phony character for the microphone manner. "Shucks,'' stutters Lonesome Rhodes, as he strim-strams on his li'l ole git-tar, "Ah'm jes' a country boy." And soon his public stretches as far as his I can see.

Following the Budd Schulberg story on which the film is based, Kazan follows the great man from a jailhouse to a penthouse, and the trip is sometimes fun. Kazan takes time to inspect such scenic wonders of TV as the reason-why-sell, the inverse commercial, the collective think, the built-in crowd. He also provides some hilarious examples of TV shoptalk ("Great show. J.B." "Ye-e-es, I think it had size"). And all the while he is sinking the oyster knife into his victim, who loves nothing in the world so much as power--above all the power to make people crawl.

So far, soso. The film has moved too slowly, and Andy Griffith in his first movie role has been uneven and never quite convincing; but Patricia Neal has provided a sensitive study of what it is like to be in love with a hokum Yokum. And then the villain hits the top. He goes hog-wild, and so does Director Kazan. Instead of keeping the menace down to life size, the script permits its corn-fed psychopath to sphacelate through the U.S. social body like some malignant growth, until he actually threatens to take over the Federal Government. As the driving force of a fascist-tinged political movement. Lonesome Rhodes is promised a Cabinet post as Secretary for National Morale. But by this time the moviegoer is not believing a word of it, and he may well be wondering if Director Kazan, like the villain of his piece, has not somehow mistaken his public for a bunch of "stupid slobs."

The Garment Jungle (Columbia) exposes the bare facts of life in the dress business. As the film begins, a wealthy dress manufacturer (Lee J. Cobb) leaps at a shapely model and rips the frock off her back, seam by seam, until she stands there looking downcast in her uplift. "Look at all these operations!'' he screams at his partner. "If we ran a union shop . . . we'd go broke making this dress." By paying his workers less than the contract minimum, Boss Cobb maintains what garment gamesmen call "The Edge''--a margin of profit that can make the difference between retirement to Miami or to a county relief check. But to keep the union out, he must pay a stiff percentage of his profits to an underworking (Richard Boone) whose strongboys keep the little man in line and the union organizers on the anxious seat.

The price of protection soon goes up. Cobb's partner, who wants the union in and the hoods out, winds up at the bottom of an elevator shaft. After that, the picture turns into a shemozzle over the manufacturer's soul as well as his love life (Valerie French) and his dollar, with the racketeer on the side of the angels and a union organizer (Robert Loggia) reading the gospel according to Dave Dubinsky--with one surprising variation. There is plenty of union activity, in a manner of speaking, but it generally seems to be of the kind that takes place between guys and dolls. The organizer, for instance, spends most of his time snuffling after his sexy young wife (Gia Scala) in an unpleasantly vulgar manner. The patronizing assumption seems to be that working people are always crude, and that leads to the soupy conclusion that crudity is therefore a virtue.

The organizer eventually gets the shiv in a manner viciously reminiscent of the death of I.L.G.W.U.'s William Lurye in 1949, and after a while the dress manufacturer cops it too. That leaves only the manufacturer's son (Kerwin Mathews), a superslick young article who hoodwinks the hoods and apparently manages with unseemly haste to inherit the organizer's widow along with his father's business.

Monkey on My Back (United Artists) is a picture about drug addiction that jabs the moviegoer full of sickly thrills while piously professing that it is simply pointing a moral with a morphine needle.

In a woozily inaccurate way the film is a biography of Barney Ross (Cameron Mitchell), onetime lightweight (1933) and welterweight (1934-38) boxing champion of the world.* The story starts with Barney's famous victory over Jimmy McLarnin, describes his wastrel ways as champion, and soon comes to his downfall under the whirling assault of the human pinwheel, Henry Armstrong. In the next few years, as the film tells the story, Barney gambles away his restaurant business and (for the time being) the affection of his best girl (Dianne Foster), winds up in the Marines during World War II.

On Guadalcanal Barney holds a strong point alone against hundreds of Japanese, kills 22 of them and saves the life of a wounded buddy. His reward: the Silver Star and a dose of malignant malaria. For the skull-shattering headaches that accompany the first bouts of fever, medics prescribe morphine; and by the time the malaria appears to be gone, so is Barney's moral resistance. He is an abject addict. But why? The script states explicitly the physiological basis of his addiction, but about the psychological causes it can only hem and haw: "The roar of the crowd ... is quite a narcotic . . . but morphine is a bad substitute."

After that the story's morale goes to pieces almost as fast as Barney's. The camera dotes on scenes of degradation with such lickerish delight that the rolled sleeve becomes a more important symbol of sensuality than the lifted skirt. As for the film hero's cure, it can no more be taken seriously than a tour of the haunted house in an amusement park, although Ross himself has not taken drugs for ten years. As the first of three opium operas that have been scheduled since narcotics became a suitable subject for Hollywood films (TIME, Dec. 24), Monkey on My Back suggests strongly that it is already high time Hollywood kicked the habit.

*Who filed suit two weeks ago for $5,000,000 damages against United Artists and Essaness Associates on grounds that the advertising for the picture depicts him as an unregenerate drug addict.

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