The New Pictures

Witness for the Prosecution (Arthur Hornblow; United Artists). "He's like a drowning man clutching at a razor blade." A famed British barrister (Charles Laughton) is referring to his feckless client (Tyrone Power). Indicted for the murder of a wealthy widow, the fellow faces a trial in which all the evidence--a will too timely altered in his favor, a maid who places him in the house on the night of the murder--is disastrously against him. His only hope is the testimony of his wife (Marlene Dietrich). But on the witness stand the wife declares that in the first place she is not his wife, and in the second place his story is a lie.

At this point the legal tangle begins to look painfully like a hangman's knot. But presto! The tangle turns into a cat's cradle of evidence that whodunit expert Agatha Christie, author of the long-running play on which the picture is based, manipulates with the skill and deft craftsmanship of long experience. The last scene is, as the British say, a basher.

Credits: to Director Billy Wilder, for his usual skillful job, and to Actor Charles Laughton, for an amusing piece of outrageous mugging. His John Bullge at the waistline is absurdly impressive, and his cranks and quiddities are sometimes elegantly sly Churchillustrations.

Pursuit of the Graf Spee (Powell and Pressburger; Rank) is a good sea story, not very well told; but there are moments when it holds, like a sea shell, the soundIng memory of the waves Britannia used to rule.

In 1939, just after World War II began, three cruisers of the Royal Navy (Ajax, Achilles, Exeter) sighted a dangerous German raider, the pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee, off the coast of Uruguay, and attacked. They had their nerve. The German was one of the most formidable ships afloat--a fact soon demonstrated. In little more than an hour the Exeter was wallowing out of action. But the other two cruisers, harrying the enemy like sharks at a whale, managed to hit where it hurt. The German commander (Peter Finch) withdrew into the River Plate, and docked at Montevideo. Prodded by the Allies, neutral Uruguay allowed the Graf Spee less than four days for repairs, and meanwhile the British spread rumors of a large (and largely nonexistent) fleet that had gathered to intercept the raider's escape. The Germans swallowed the bluff; Hitler himself approved the order to scuttle the Graf Spee. Britain had won the first significant sea fight of World War II.

The story is competently filmed in pretty Technicolor, and it is probably accurate from barnacles to binnacles, but it lingers too long over the details. The producers seem to have forgotten that in war pictures, as in true love, there is little to be said for long engagements.

Smiles of a Summer Night (AB

Svensk; Rank). On the subject of temptation, Martin Luther once said: "You can't prevent the birds flying over your head, but you can keep them from nesting in your hair." With this for his text, Swedish Director Ingmar (Torment) Bergman*has preached in this picture a sermon on sensuality that the pastor of Wittenberg would scarcely have said amen to. But the Swedes, whose notions about sex have changed since Luther's time, were tickled pink with the picture. So were a lot of European critics: at

Cannes they gave it a grand prix as the best comedy of 1956. It may not be all that funny, but it is sexy enough in a simple, sweaty way.

The interlocking triangles include a prominent Swedish lawyer, his grown son, his young wife, his ex-mistress, the upstairs maid, a Swedish peer and his fun-loving wife. Essentially it is love's old sweet story of how the man chases the woman until she catches him. Everybody ends up at a house party where the moral climate is established by the hostess, who declares that the only time a person needs morals is when he is playing solitaire.

Shot straight, the story would make nothing better than a smoker film. But Director Bergman has played it all as a dainty piece of what might be called De Maupassementerie. His settings are in exquisitely bad fin de siecle style; his landscapes redound with swans and willows. In the soft, romantic focus of his camera, outline fails, objects become memories, events transpire in a precarious tense neither past nor present. But the screenplay --which Bergman himself wrote--is a hard mosaic of epigrams (I love people, cries a naughty old woman. "I could have them stuffed--and set up in rows, just to look at"). And he often shows a wicked sense of just when to stop a joke, of the eloquent thing not to say.

Plainly, Director Bergman intended to produce the best French picture ever made in Sweden. But in this at least he failed. A Frenchman would surely have reminded himself, as the racy lines came popping into his mind, that the best way to spoil sex is to talk too much about it.

*No kin to Swedish Actress Ingrid Bergman.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.