New Picture

Swell Guy (Mark Hellinger; Universal-International) is a full-length portrait of a slob (Sonny Tufts). He is a famed, chaotically incompetent war correspondent who can fool practically everybody in the postwar world except his fellow reporters, his mother and, in rare, lucid moments, himself.

Stopping off to warm his ego in a hero-worshiping small town, he seduces the local belle (Ann Blyth), hornswoggles a keen judge of character, her father (John Litel), and cleans every small businessman along Main Street in a succession of crap games. In an expansive moment he also helps his slow-moving brother (William Gargan) to swing an important business deal; a little later he almost persuades his brother's wife (Ruth Warrick) to skip town with him. He has, it seems, just one good streak: his young nephew's fatuous, gee-whillikers devotion inspires in him a devotion equally infantile.

Such studies of just how low a louse can crawl, though stylish among amateurs of the psychopathic, are seldom more interesting, dramatically, than watching a real louse crawl from one point to another. Yet Producer Mark (The Killers) Hellinger and his colleagues have provided a good many compensations. The town's "class" bar and company picnic, and most of the-supporting performances, are unusually shrewd keyhole glimpses of U.S. provincial life. Sonny Tufts's transformation from a big, pleasant male ingenue to a resourceful actor is as impressive as it is startling. With plenty of assistance from script and direction, Tufts gives a cruelly recognizable portrait of a neurotic extravert: a type all too common in real life and all too rarely seen-through on the screen.

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