The New Pictures

The Pajama Game (Warner) offers proof that Broadway's canniest silver fox, Co-Producer-Director-Writer George Abbott, need yield to no one in Hollywood when he sits in the director's chair. This glittering musicomedy, whose zany spirits and singable tunes (Hernando's Hideaway, Hey There) ran up 1,000 Broadway performances, sparkles even more on film. With much of the original cast, Abbott and Co-Producer-Director Stanley Donen re-create Co-Author Richard Bissell's silly, seamy saga of life and capitalistic strife in a Dubuque nightwear factory.

Pitted against the factory boss in a manner that often plops them against each other: the factory's lass-grabbing superintendent (John Raitt) and the union's pretty, blonde grievance committee (Doris Day) of Local 343, Amalgamated Shirt and Pajama Workers of America. The plant undergoes a hysterical speedup, a production crisis ("The tops are 15 minutes behind the bottoms"), a protest slowdown and, finally, a real ball of a strike rally. Though the incidental fun-making may not be a very realistic portrait of labor or management, even the most aggressive bureaucrats on both sides will likely be too diverted to object. Aided by the twinkle-toed hamming of Carol Haney and Eddie Foy Jr., The Pajama Game is eventually won by its prancing proletarians, buttons up as the season's brightest, bawdiest musical spree.

The James Dean Story (George-Altman; Warner) resurrects Hollywood's late symbol of rebellious youth, the 24-year-old actor who was killed two years ago while zooming through the California dusk in his $7,000 Porsche Spyder. The movie is no more mawkish than many of the diehard Dean fans who will flock to see it. It exploits a ghoulish clamor for Dean's voice to echo once more from the grave, but it does so with a mortician's lugubrious solicitude for the living.

In what is billed as ''a new biographical method,'' the movie alternates live action and still pictures to trace Actor Dean's spasmodic life in fits and starts. Dragged in to shed flickering light on the subject: Jimmy's relatives and sidekicks from Indiana farm days, barroom buddies from Manhattan and Los Angeles, even two grieving young women who claim an intimate acquaintance with the deceased. The movie's producers, laboring to show all the moods of their moody hero, have brought forth an emotional blob. Dean's cold trail went even colder somewhere in a production morass of 8,000 photos, three detective agencies, 13 researchers and 360 Dean fan clubs.

The narration, pompously intoned by Martin Gabel and ponderously written by Dean's scenarist friend Stewart (Rebel Without a Cause) Stern, at times sounds like a pretentious paean ("Youth mourned itself in the passing of James Dean. Because he died young and belonged to no one, every girl could feel that he belonged to her alone . . . [They could share the delicious melancholy of being witnesses at their own funerals"). Gradually, the votive gas flames leap higher at the altar, and the smudge pots pour forth incense. Dean is variously shown as a temperamental artist always stomping off when crossed, a senselessly guilt-ridden child ( "My mother is dead because I am bad"), a bullfighter in his daydreams, an antisocial neurotic.

The legend of the brooding genius is always simmering near by--just offscreen, on the sound track, between frames. But it never really comes off for the simple reason that it was largely fraudulent, the creation of movie-fan magazines and ambitious young Dean himself. Director George Stevens, who pushed James Byron Dean very close to his brilliant acting ceiling in Giant, once phrased an obituary that is probably far more accurate than the Story: "Jimmy was just a regular kid trying to make good in Hollywood. Someone's making a pile of dough out of this morbid Dean business, and that's one reason they're working so hard to keep it alive. But the full irony of Dean's plan to win fame and glory was that his fatal accident wasn't a part of the scheme. Yet, that really made the legend.''

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