The New Pictures

The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw (20th Century-Fox), a British western shot in Spain, was apparently expected to convey the satiric notion that when Hollywood reaches for the six-shooter it usually produces something of a large bore. But somehow what comes across is the wistful and delightfully absurd idea that a good many apparently tame Englishmen secretly like to fancy themselves racketing around the Wild West like pure cussedness in cowpants, blasting the bepluribus out of silver dollars at 30 paces and generally keeping the beastly natives in their place.

The Englishman here (Kenneth More) is a gentleman's gunsmith who heads west with a reasonable expectation of doing business-where there's gun smoke, they must use firearms. Beyond that, the only thing the man knows about the U.S. frontier is that Jesse James is "a frightful female." He is therefore rather astonished when several improperly dressed individuals with bright paint daubed on their faces begin to circle the stagecoach on horseback, uttering unmannerly cries in a foreign language. Outraged, he orders the carriage to halt, stomps out to give the Indian chief-whom quite by accident he disarms and captures-a severe dressing down. "My dear fellow, this coach was traveling at a legal rate of speed on a public highway. If you don't desist, I shall protest to the authorities." The chief, grateful for his life, calls off his braves.

The story of this encounter soon goes the rounds in Fractured Jaw, but nobody believes it until the Englishman (with the invisible assistance of a spring and lever strapped to his forearm) casually outdraws one of the fastest guns in the Territory. At that instant, of course, he wins the heart of the cutie that's known as Kate (Jayne Mansfield), but to his horror he also acquires a sheriff's star. And so the rest of the picture resolves into a daydream of how easily the West would have been won if the English, instead of mere colonials, had set out to do the job.

I Was Monty's Double (NTA Pictures). In the spring of 1944, not long before Dday, Adolf Hitler had reason to congratulate himself on the efficiency of German intelligence in North Africa. All along the air route from the Rock to the Nile, agents picked up rumors that General Sir Bernard L. Montgomery was making a secret inspection tour of Allied forces in the area, and several of the best reported that they had actually seen and spoken with the general. The Germans knew that invasion of Europe was imminent, but they were not dead sure where it would come from. So just to be on the safe side, Hitler held back 60,000 troops and a Panzer division from the Channel coast, deployed them to reinforce the French Riviera against a possible attack from North Africa.

A move more advantageous to the invading forces could scarcely have been planned by the Allied high command-as in fact it was. The truth is, General Montgomery did not make an inspection tour of North Africa in 1944; he was much too busy in England. The trip was actually made by Lieut. M.E. Clifton James of the Royal Army Pay Corps, a small-time character actor who bore such a staggering resemblance to Monty and mimicked him so well that not a man in North Africa twigged the substitution-not even Monty's onetime batman.

Actor James impressively repeats his historic impersonation in this witty little British thriller based on his own published account of the adventure. Even after 15 years the resemblance is still strong, but quite aside from that, Actor James displays a gentle charm and a comic flair that go a long way to ingratiate the film's only real fault: the scriptwriter's tendency to substitute bang-bang for hush-hush.

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