The New Pictures

Undercurrent (MGM) is billed as a "mystery romance." The major mystery: how can such a wealth of high-priced Hollywood talent add up to such a poor movie?

The stars are top magnitude: Katharine Hepburn (who has not been seen by moviegoers since Without Love, more than a year and a half ago) and Robert Taylor (whose Song of Russia in early 1944 was his final movie chore before he became a Navy lieutenant, j.g.). The story, by a glossy-magazine fictioneer (Thelma Strabel), was adapted for the screen by a successful playwright (Edward Chodorov) and nursed into celluloid by an able director (Vincente Minnelli). The movie was costumed, mounted, lighted, photographed and scored by MGM's stable of always competent, frequently brilliant technicians. Somewhere along the production line, all this skilled effort went down the drain.

The indigestible plot, full of false leads and unkept promises, is like a woman's magazine serial consumed at one gulp. It begins as a romance. Miss Hepburn is a scientist's daughter--a moody, headstrong girl who doesn't quite know what she wants out of life. Then Robert Taylor, a fabulously rich airplane-parts tycoon, sweeps her off her feet.

The scene shifts to Washington and the plot to Cinderella. In the capital, where her bridegroom is obviously a man of consequence, Katy-appears at a cocktail party in a mousy dress with a frumpy, ruffled collar. All the other women are wearing chic, severe black with diamond clips. Katy, of course, feels perfectly terrible for a good many feet of film until Taylor takes her shopping for some Irene gowns.

Without much warning, the background music suddenly takes on a menacing note and Katy finds herself involved in a psychological mystery. Who is this brother of Taylor's who must never be mentioned? Like the audience, Katy has never met .the mysterious relative whose name drives Taylor into queer fits of hysterical reticence. Unlike the audience, she is consumed with curiosity and foreboding about her missing inlaw. Amid some embarrassing melodrama, it begins to look as if Taylor is a scoundrel, maybe a murderer, and--worst fate of all--the short side of a romantic triangle.

Possible solution to Undercurrent's basic mystery: too many studio cooks. In the bigger, richer movie-manufacturing plants, executive geniuses are sometimes too helpful in telling the real picture makers how a picture should be made.

My Darling Clementine (20th Century-Fox) is horse opera for the carriage trade. Directed by John Ford, who made the smashingly successful Stagecoach eight years ago, the new picture invites comparison to that old near-classic. And Clementine does indeed closely resemble Stagecoach. Nonetheless it is a rattling good movie full of gusto, gunplay and romance.

All the corn-colored stock characters of oldtime. Wild West melodrama are on hand. All of them are nicely preserved. Henry Fonda, as the half-reluctant, pistol-packing marshal of booming, lawless Tombstone, could hardly be better. Victor .Mature, who used to wander aimlessly through slick-haired juvenile roles before his 41-month hitch in the Coast Guard, actually does some acting as the dipsomaniac doctor-turned-renegade. Linda Darnell (a brunette for the last time before dyeing her hair honey-blonde to play Amber) is the lushly pretty dance-hall tart.

With Clementine, Director Ford has accomplished more than an intelligent retelling of a hoary yarn. His camera sometimes pauses, with a fresh, childlike curiosity, to examine the shape and texture of a face, a pair of square-dancing feet, a scrap of desert landscape or a sunlit dusty road. The leisurely lens--a trick Europeans frequently overdo and Hollywood seldom attempts--makes some of Ford's black-&-white sequences as richly lifelike as anything ever trapped in Technicolor.

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