Also Showing

Humoresque (Warner), a glossy melodrama, follows poor, slum-raised John Garfield's struggle to become a celebrated violinist under the patronage of wealthy, neurotic Joan Crawford. Joan is already married, a dipsomaniac and somewhat older than her protege. When she finally admits to herself that she is not really the right woman for Garfield (whose only true love, after all, is his music), she takes one last stiff drink and walks straight into the ocean.

Its fashionable blend of tear-drenched love, elegantly recorded music and big-name stars should make this movie a profitable investment for its manufacturers. The dusty old Fannie Hurst yarn (a 1920 silent movie hit) has been refurbished with neat, up-to-date dialogue by Clifford Odets and Zachary Gold. Oscar Levant, shuffling casually through the plot as Garfield's cynical friend and accompanist, plays the piano efficiently and gets off some fairly funny wisecracks. Garfield's make-believe fiddling of Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Bizet, etc. is brilliantly dubbed on the sound track by concert violinist Isaac Stern.

Moviegoers will note that Joan Crawford, once a mere M-G-M clotheshorse, has made great progress as an actress since her Charleston-dancing-daughter days. She remains a bit handsome and unmussed to be a convincing drunk, but her jittery, unhappy egocentric is just what the script calls for. What is more notable, she manages to look sexy in glasses. Garfield seems as intense and preoccupied as a great genius is commonly reputed to be, and his sullen-deadpan lovemaking might very well, as the plot contends, drive any high-strung lady to speedy self-destruction.

Wanted for Murder (Excelsior; 20th Century-Fox), an agreeable English chiller, follows a sleek bachelor (Eric Portman) on those unexplained evening strolls which so disturb his mother. She has good reason to brood. There is insanity in the family, and sonny is already several jumps ahead of mother's dire premonitions: i.e., he has strangled his sixth girl on the evening the story opens, throttles his seventh virtually before your eyes, and is hard at work on No. 8 when interrupted by the biggest pack of policemen since the old Keystone chases.

Between murders, the fiend lavishly scatters clues that a child could decipher, but Roland Culver, as Scotland Yard, makes the hunt look intelligently difficult. Mr. Portman, who suggests a late Roman emperor fresh from a fitting with a good Bond Street tailor, not only stalks his quarry with treacherous gentility, but even invests his madman with terror and pathos. His performance, Mr. Culver's, and sensitive photography, combine to make an interesting though not irresistible little melodrama.

The Time, the Place and the Girl

(Warner) is another backstage musical that explains the hazards of financing and producing a lavish Broadway show. On opening night, as usual (in the movies), the unknown ingenue becomes a star. As usual, the serious romance (Dennis Morgan and Martha Vickers) is skillfully balanced by a gag romance (Jack Carson and Janis Paige).

Thej. familiar reworking of this familiar song & dance offers no surprises, but it has familiar virtues: Technicolor, pleasant tunes--of which at least two (Oh, But I Do; A Gal in Calico) are doubtless headed straight for the Hit Parade--and a cast of attractively energetic young people who appear to enjoy their simpleminded work.

Cross My Heart (Paramount) tries to harness the explosive personality of Betty Hutton to a little plot about a girl who is an incurable, congenital liar. She falsely confesses to murder in order to give her lawyer-boyfriend (Sonny Tufts) some courtroom publicity. A slow remake of a sprightly 1937 movie (True Confession with the late Carole Lombard), it might possibly have been saved if Miss Hutton had been allowed to tear a few more songs to shreds in her interestingly destructive style.

The Beast with Five Fingers (Warner) is for strong stomachs only. It is a minor horror movie with a truly horrible central idea: the severed hand of a dead pianist continues to live a life of its own. The hand scuttles crablike across the floor, throttles its enemies, strikes doleful chords on the piano, and generally makes a poking, clutching nuisance of itself. This unsavory notion all takes place in the crumbling mind of Peter Lorre, but the camera technicians' trick photography makes these hallucinations shockingly plausible.

Director Robert Florey, plainly untroubled by considerations of taste, concentrated on peddling gooseflesh to cinemagoers who dote on being frightened.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.