The New Pictures

The Killers (Mark Hellinger-Universal), as Ernest Hemingway wrote it, was a short story and a simple one. It told how a pair of professional assassins talked tough to some people in a lunch wagon. Horrified young Nick Adams (Hemingway as a boy) managed to warn their quarry, the Swede, but the Swede just stayed on his bed, knowing he could not escape. Within a few crisp pages of dialogue, Hemingway created a masterpiece in terror-by-suggestion.

This sinister little classic has now been blown up by Producer Mark Hellinger into a full-length movie. There is a bangup opening with a good reproduction of the short story, virtually as Hemingway wrote it. Then an insurance investigator (Edmond O'Brien) noses in on the inexplicable killing. His research takes him to the dead Swede's beneficiary, an Atlantic City chambermaid (Queenie Smith), to a Philadelphia detective (Sam Levene) and, with their help, through more & more plot-laden flashbacks of ringside and gangster life.

As it turns out, the Swede (screen newcomer Burt Lancaster) was a natural born fall guy. By the time such seasoned misbehaviorists as Albert Dekker and Ava Gardner are through with him, the double-and triple-crossings get so thick that his death seems about the only simple thing in his career.

The movie is no match for the story that inspired it, but it is an exceptionally suspenseful, crisp and lively melodrama, distinguished by shrewd casting and playing, plenty of harsh action, and an extra edge of low-life authenticity. Odd literary note: the Hemingway dialogue, well presented in the film, becomes as strangely formalized on the sound track as heroic couplets.

In the '20s, when Manhattan teemed with murdering bootleggers, big spenders, lovable drunks and chorines with hearts of gold, one of Broadway's favorite mirrors of the times was Columnist Mark Hellinger. After nine years in Hollywood, Hellinger has somehow managed to retain the wide-eyed, gaudy spirit of the old days. The Killers, his first independent production for Universal, is packed with scenes, characters and dialogue straight out of Hellinger's Broadway.

At 43, greying, blue-eyed Producer Hellinger is noted for whopping charitable donations and extravagant tipping ($15 to captains, $10 to waiters, up to $5 to busboys, with an extra $1 each for winning smiles). Reputed to be a soft touch for any & all hard-luck stories, he favors midnight blue shirts with white silk ties, drives a black Lincoln limousine equipped with siren, white bearskin rug, New York license plate (MH 1) and bulletproof glass (gift of a former gangster acquaintance). Hollywood also reveres Hellinger for his seemingly inexhaustible stock of excellent liquor, his fondness for intricate practical jokes and his small superstitions.

His life with ex-Ziegfeld Follies beauty Gladys Glad was fodder for the most sentimental Hellinger copy. Married in 1929, they were divorced three years later. In his New York Mirror column Hellinger unabashedly sampled public reaction to the divorce. After imaginary interviews with a Wall Street clerk, a taxi driver, a socialite, etc., his final paragraph was the "Reaction of the Columnist, deep down in his heart: 'It's going to be awfully tough without you, baby. Awfully, awfully tough.' "

The next year Mark and Gladys were remarried and now live with their two adopted five-year-olds (Mark and Gladys), an English bulldog and two Pekingese in a Hollywood house that boasts almost as many bars as bathrooms.

Brief Encounter (J. Arthur Rank) and They Were Sisters (Rank-Universal) are pat examples of good and not-so-good British moviemaking.

They Were Sisters is imitation Hollywood. Starring James Mason, whose talent for scowling his way through romantic-sadist roles has won him an avid U.S. following, the picture is overplotted, overacted, overlong. Its overdose of sentimentality--a drug Hollywood administers superbly--is something the British frequently fumble.

Brief Encounter, adapted from one of Noel Coward's Tonight at 8:30 playlets, is a heart-throbbing little valentine made with great skill. A fragile tale about a suburban matron (Celia Johnson) who falls in love with a doctor (Trevor Howard), it is a plausible, intelligently told romance, filmed with disturbing realism. Both frustrated lovers are married and have families. Since they are nice, near middleaged, perfectly respectable English people, they know from the beginning that their romance is both hopeless and doomed.

Actress Celia Johnson in no way resembles what U.S. moviegoers have learned to expect of a suburban matron (i.e., a professional beauty with all her assets amplified by Westmore make-up and Irene gowns). Miss Johnson seems to be exactly what the plot calls for: thirtyish, of middling looks and income, the mother of two children. She has an imperfect hairdo, a few undisguised wrinkles, often gets caught in unflattering camera angles, appears more than once in the same old none-too-chic hat.

When they are making a movie about average people, the British apparently do not know how to turn their heroines--and thus their plots--into something more gorgeous than life. The fault has merits. Hollywood glamor experts will pity, but they might also give some thoughtful study to Brief Encounter's low-budget details.

Claudia and David (20th Century-Fox) have now been married long enough to be the parents of a three-year-old son--but they are still sparring and sparking like honeymooners. This adroit, polished, sweetly sentimental sequel to Claudia (1943) carries on with the marital ups & downs of the young architect (Robert Young) and his pleasantly nitwit child bride (Dorothy McGuire).

Admirers of the Rose Franken magazine stories, play, radio serial, book and the first movie know about what to expect of Claudia. In real life, she would doubtless drive even a less excitable type than David to drink, Reno or assault & battery. In fiction, the young couple's incompatibility merely inspires piquant plot complications, which are played mostly for laughs.

If the sequels continue, Claudia may eventually be a fluttery great-grandmother, still blithely parking in front of fireplugs and flying into jealous tantrums about her husband's business appointments. Thus far, the Claudia and David marriage has progressed only to harmless misunderstandings about the Other Woman (Mary Astor) and the Other Man (John Sutton).

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