The New Pictures

Tiger Bay (Rank; Continental) is a waterfront slum in Cardiff, Wales. A freighter lands. A sailor hurries to his mistress. In the flat where she lives, the table is set for two--but not for him. She suggests that he go "sleep with the sea." With rising fury they scream at each other in Polish, but the przeklenstwa are not loud enough to smother the pistol shots that kill her.

Through the mail slot, a small orphaned girl watches the murder. The sailor hides the pistol in the stair well and hides himself. The little girl reaches for the gun, and their eyes meet. She grabs it and runs away.

Movingly acted by Horst Buchholz and twelve-year-old Hayley Mills, daughter of British Cinemactor John Mills (who plays a police inspector), and masterfully directed by J. Lee Thompson, the story that follows makes enough suspense to bring sweat to stone foreheads. Oblique, shadowy photography gives Cardiff the musical unease of The Third Man's Vienna, and from the exhausting tension there is seldom any relief. The picture cuts abruptly back and forth, now watching the methodical police picking up clues with a sort of slue-footed genius, now following the killer and the little girl.

The young sailor has killed in passion, but once he has the child in his clutches, he cannot kill the only witness to the crime. As the police come nearer to the man, the man comes nearer to the heart of the child--and the audience. With the final chase scene, only retired desk sergeants and the ghosts of faithless mistresses can help but wish that every cop in Cardiff will end up under 50 feet of water off Tiger Bay.

Who Was That Lady? (Columbia) gives the first sly wink of its camera eye in a Columbia University chemistry lab, where an arcane experiment is in progress: Assistant Professor Tony Curtis is kissing a girl student. An unstable element, his wife, Janet Leigh, enters the lab and explodes. Janet promptly informs the errant Tony that he has defiled their five-year marriage and that she is heading for Reno to be decontaminated. Poor Tony begs his old pal, Dean Martin, a TV writer, to cook up an alibi to placate Janet. Dean's idea: Tony is really an undercover FBI man, and the girl he kissed is an enemy agent spying on a secret Government project at Columbia.

As might be expected, a comic invention of this sort is the mother of some fairly silly plot necessities. When Tony springs his FBI status on Janet, she thaws no faster than a glacier to a lighted match. But when he produces a TV prop department pistol and identity card, and shows her his clannish insigne of rank (four dots "tattooed" on his heel--"J. Edgar Hoover has seven"), Janet melts into a my-hero mood and virtually orders Tony to kiss-and-not-tell in the line of future duty. Fellow FBI-Fibster Dean gets an erotomaniacal glint in his eye. The boys' joint mission, he tells Janet, is to trap two svelte spies at a local Chinese restaurant. Enter a pair of bosomy blonde show girls. "What do you girls do?" asks Tony gingerly. "They sing and dance--like rabbits," answers owlish Dean.

At a nearby table sits a real FBI agent checking on this zany imposture, and at his side is (who else?) Janet, babbling to him about the force ("How many dots do you have?"). The next dotty reel brings on the real spies. Farce's end finds Tony and Dean bravely intoning America the Beautiful while flooding the sub-basement of the Empire State Building under the impression that they are sinking their Soviet captors' submarine.

Who Was That Lady? scarcely skirts the standard pitfall of the comedy of errors: i.e., as the errors multiply, the comedy divides and dwindles. But Lady's trio of nimble headliners foot the measures of Producer-Writer Norman Krasna's so-so script trippingly. Dean Martin neatly blends tomfoolery and tomcattery. Except for the initial spat, real life Husband-and-Wife Team Curtis and Leigh nibble at each other as voraciously as if they were hors d'oeuvres at a cannibal cocktail party. The assorted nonsense will probably irk no one except college faculty wives, who may find the decor irritatingly ludicrous. On an assistant professor's salary, Tony and Janet maintain a duplex Manhattan penthouse, complete with panoramic view and a gracious clutter of antique silver buckets atwirl with champagne.

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