The New Pictures

The Two Mrs. Carrolls (Warner) is a melodrama about a daft painter who subtly murders one wife after another. It was a Broadway hit chiefly because it provided a superb five-finger exercise for one of the trickiest actresses in the trade--Elisabeth Bergner. With the less versatile Barbara Stanwyck in the Bergner role, the story is merely thin and shabby.

There are some pleasantly grim noises made by cathedral bells. Once in a while, especially when the second Mrs. Carroll begins to suspect what she is up against. audience spines register an authentic chill. But most of the show is a clutter of entrance & exit, about as dramatically arresting as a game of in & out the window.

Miss Stanwyck, who does well enough with a tough, worldly kind of part, is baffled by the sleight of hand required for this one. Humphrey Bogart also appears uncomfortable. Violence and murder are old stuff to him, but madness and paintbrushes are not quite in his line. Little Miss Ann Carter manages to make a precocious child seem likable and attractive. Thanks to her, the picture is almost worth the trip.

Carnegie Hall (Morros-LeBaron; United Artists) probably contains more famous music per foot of film, interpreted by more famous musicians, than any other movie ever made. The chances are that it will gross millions. This does not mean, necessarily, that music lovers will love it. Nearly every number is the most over-familiar one that could have been chosen.

The performances range from good through ragged to corny. Carnegie Hall's makers evidently tried hard not to mangle, and they recorded considerable stretches of the music, rather than cinema's customary flibbertigibbet tatters. Even so, two hours of this kind of frenzied anthologizing, however well meant, are exhausting. It is often said in defense of such musical popularization that it serves to interest many people in good music who might never otherwise learn to care for it. It might also be suggested that the effort could frighten many potential music lovers away.

Nonetheless, the picture has a certain documentary interest. In it, posterity may see how many of today's most prominent musicians--some good, some not so good --look and act at close range, under weirdly confused, commercial circumstances. These artists include Damrosch, Heifetz, Pinza, Pons, Rodzinski, Rubinstein, Stokowski.

Conspicuously absent in the lineup of celebrities: Toscanini, the crowning glory of Carnegie Hall, and Philharmonic Manager Arthur Judson, who might, as a sort of Phantom of the Opera, be considered indispensable to any such story.

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