The New Pictures

Gilda (Columbia) is the result of ambrosial Rita Hayworth's desire to prove that she can act. She proves it fully as well as the next Hollywood girl (unless that girl happens to have specific talent for acting), but mainly, as always before, she proves that she is such a looker that nothing else much matters.

It is Miss Hayworth's business to portray a woman as bad as she is beautiful. On the rebound from a young bum (Glenn Ford) she marries an elegant bounder (George Macready), who falls desperately in love with her. She then spends a large part of the picture acting as much like a nympholept as the traffic will bear and, since all this transpires in Buenos Aires, the traffic is reasonably lively. Mr. Ford, meanwhile, develops a fierce protective attachment for his boss, Mr. Macready. He runs his dressy gambling hell for him, supersedes him in his fascist-minded control of a tungsten cartel, and hates Macready's wife--or so he thinks--like poison, for causing the great man to suffer. In the long run, she explains that she has misbehaved with half the men in South America not for the fun of it but purely to make Ford jealous, and that not one of those men, no, not even her husband, has so much as laid a finger on her, except in rage.

All this senseless sinning makes for a fair amount of pulpy entertainment, nicely paced and aptly delivered for the first hour or so, more & more tortuously protracted from there on out. Glenn Ford has a good deal of style as the young scoundrel, though he looks a couple of decades too callow to browbeat tungsten tycoons. George Macready, looking rather like an icicle outfitted by Wetzel, does nicely by his questionable assignment--which is to make a Nazi glamorous. But all in all it is Rita Hayworth's picture, and people who don't bother too much about the last several reels will enjoy sharing it with her.

Dragonwyck (20th Century-Fox), an American-Gothic period piece based on a best-seller by Novelist Anya Seton, won't teach anyone much about the patroon system or the anti-rent wars, but it ought to teach a lesson to every simple farm girl in Greenwich, Conn.

The lesson: watch out for the jaded aristocrats of New York. Back in the 1840s, according to the evidence of Dragonwyck, one innocent Greenwich girl named Miranda (Gene Tierney) knew no better. She was helping with the chores on her father's farm when fate gave her a chance to go to Dragonwyck, the Hudson Valley home of a distant relative. Miranda trembled with joy, begged to be allowed to accept. Her parents, dubious at first, finally relented.

So off Miranda goes, with high hopes and a new Bible. Dragonwyck turns out to be a huge Gothic mansion near Albany. The relative turns out to be none other than haughty Nicholas Van Ryn (Vincent Price), whom any respectable Connecticut female should have spotted at once as not only a patroon but an untrustworthy, undemocratic rascal. Nicholas wears broadcloth and satin, dolefully plays a harpsichord and barks at his fat, stupid wife, treats his tenant-farmers like serfs.

Had Miranda been clever, she would have turned right around and gone back to Greenwich. But, as her father said, in his uncouth country way, she did not have the sense of a tomtit. In spite of ghosts, drugs, madness and murder she stays on, until the last of the Van Ryns is dead and Yankee democracy sweeps in triumph up the Hudson Valley.

Producer Ernst Lubitsch's sets are as lavish as Novelist Seton's story is lurid. Pretty Farm Girl Gene Tierney and Patroon Vincent Price play their parts as though James K. Polk were still in the White House and it all mattered.

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