The New Pictures

The Wreck of the Mary Deare (Blaustein-Baroda; M-G-M). It was a dark and stormy night. The Sea Witch, a salvager out of Southampton, was riding out the Channel gale as a tight ship should. Suddenly, out of the night, a vast shape reared above the tiny vessel. With a gasp the helmsman spun the wheel. A wall of water smashed the Sea Witch broadside, hurling her clear of a big freighter, which "slid by like a cliff." Looking up, the skipper (Charlton Heston) saw no lights on the freighter, no sign of life on the bridge. On the stern he read the rusty legend:

MARY DEARE

Hong Kong

Was she a derelict? The skipper caught a dangling rope and swung himself aboard. Fires out, engines dead, cargo--kapok, tea and aircraft engines--apparently intact. "Anybody aboard?" he bellowed as he wandered through the metal guts of the old gasper. "Anybody aboard?" A blow sent him reeling. A mad. bloody head leaped at him out of the shadows. "Who are you?" the creature (Gary Cooper) snarled. "What are you doing here?"

But who was this derelict aboard the derelict, and what was he doing there? Why had the crew deserted the ship when she was obviously in no danger of sinking? Why had one man been left aboard, left for dead in the No. 4 hold? Who had set fire to the radio shack, and blown a hole in the hull, just above the water line, with dynamite? Who had hidden whose corpse in the coal bunker? Why had the Mary Deare made a mysterious unscheduled stopover at Rangoon? Why did the last man aboard insist on steering her straight for the Channel rocks?

Eric Ambler, one of England's ablest writers of thrillers (Journey into Fear) and movie scripts (A Night to Remember, The Cruel Sea), evades the answers to these questions quite as skillfully as Novelist Hammond Innes did in the 1956 bestseller on which this film is based, and the result is a sloshing good scupperful of salt water and suspense. Director Michael (Around the World in 80 Days) Anderson has kept the story going full ahead, and has wrung a remarkable amount of histrionic blood from one of cinema's best-known stones, the face of Gary Cooper.

Beloved Infidel (20th Century-Fox) takes its title and its central situation from Gerold Frank's bestselling biography (TIME, Nov. 24, 1958) of Hollywood Gossipist Sheilah Graham, who was F. Scott Fitzgerald's girl friend during the last sad years of his life as a Hollywood hack. The book pretended, with some authority, to be the hard, straight stuff--novelist on the rocks. But Producer Jerry (The Best of Everything) Wald decided that the stuff was too strong for the customers he was after, and he attempted to water the old Fitzgerald down and sweeten it up. The result is one of those long, pale, fruity concoctions that the ladies are supposed to like. In this case, the taste is more than usually questionable. The industry that treated Fitzgerald so badly while he was alive treats him even worse now he is dead.

According to Columnist Graham's commercialized confessions, Fitzgerald after his famous Crack-Up was a brilliant, cynical, romantic wreck, and his life a brief, inglorious skidmark to the edge of eternity. According to this picture, he was a great, misunderstood man who was driven to drink by outrageous fortune, but just before his death he experienced a transfiguration in which the heroic drunk and the dissolving genius were transformed and redeemed in a last great love. The notion is so silly that not even the moviemakers could convince themselves it was true. Scarcely a line in Sy (The Big Country) Bartlett's script rings true, and some of them are almost ridiculously false. ("How did a girl as pretty as you get to be the biggest witch in Hollywood?" a famous actress shrieks at Sheilah. "Only the second biggest," Sheilah purrs back, looking as if she has just said something brilliant.) And scarcely a scene goes right for Director Henry (The Bravados) King. The principals stumble around in patent and sometimes comical confusion. Deborah Kerr is a fine, sensitive actress, but when she tries to play Sheilah as a hard-lipped careerist, she looks like a nice little girl about to say boo to a goose. Gregory Peck tries painfully hard to be Fitzgerald, but manages no more than a nightclub imitation of an intellectual.

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