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Let No Man Write My Epitaph (Columbia). The heroine (Shelley Winters) is on heroin. "Louie, please!" she gasps. "I need a fix! Ya gotta gimme a fix!" In this picture, unhappily, the story as well as the heroine needs a shot in the arm. Based on Novelist Willard Motley's sequel to Knock on Any Door (TIME, March 14, 1949), which made a substantial score as a Hollywood thriller, Epitaph is just a scummy rescrape of the sidewalks of Chicago.

The hero (James Darren) starts life with prospects that are not, to put it mildly, brilliant. He is the illegitimate son of a convicted killer and B-Girl Winters, who is hooked by--and sleeping with--a dope peddler (Ricardo Montalban). He grows up on Skid Row, where his playmates are rumblebums and his self-appointed guardians are a germy old barfly (Burl Ives), a good-natured prostitute (Jeanne Cooper), a slugnutty prizefighter (Rudolph Acosta), a junk-jabbing ginmill canary (Ella Fitzgerald) and a legless newsboy (Walter Burke) who packs a pretty little .32.

From all these horrors the hero is saved by--yessiree--piano lessons. After seven or eight years of them he sends trills up the spine of a young socialite (Jean Seberg), who thinks he is a genius and introduces him to the finer things of life--like, say, her penthouse. Happy Ending?

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