The New Pictures

The Woman on the Beach (RKO Radio) is sullen-faced Joan Bennett, one of Hollywood's most efficient players of loose women, in an unusual and artful thriller. Along the sand comes a Coast Guardsman (Robert Ryan), still shaky enough from an experience with a torpedo to be excused some of his sins in this film. His sins are extensive and, for a movie hero, pretty human. He is engaged to a nice girl (Nan Leslie), but when she proves too nice and cautious to marry him in haste, he takes up with Joan, begins making love to her in a sinister-looking seaside wreck. He also meets Joan's peculiar husband (Charles Bickford).

Husband Bickford, who looks rather like a Beethoven left out in the rain, was once a great painter, but has gone blind. He is unpleasantly eager to make friends with the man who is carrying on with his wife, though he coldly hints his awareness of what's up. Coast Guardsman Ryan slowly comes to realize 1) that the painter is holding Joan trapped in a sadistic relationship, 2) that Joan is no lady in distress but a bone-bred tramp, 3) that the pair of them are exploiting him for ugly, mysterious reasons of their own.

He also comes to doubt that the artist is really blind. His effort to find out, in a walk along the lip of a cliff, is a hair-raising piece of melodrama. Quieter, but no less exciting, are the nasty undertows of purely psychological uneasiness, as the members of this perverse triangle take each other's measure.

The skilled principal players interestingly suggest real people; notably good is Robert Ryan as a competent but unsophisticated man who gets involved with very bad companions. With an urgent score by Hanns Eisler, Director Jean Renoir has concocted a climax in which two men quarrel at the top of their lungs against the deafening sound of squally water and orchestral fortissimo. To balance such experiments, which smack of artiness, Renoir has thrown in some solid domestic naturalism and an excellently staged Coast Guardsmen's dance. Best of all, he has eloquently suited the pale visual tone of the film to the pale air, sea and sand of the locale and to the story's mood of blindness, ambiquity and cryptic strain.

The Brasher Doubloon (20th Century-Fox) is a rare coin that has been stolen from a dreary Pasadena mansion. Raymond Chandler's famed private detective Philip Marlowe, this time played by George Montgomery,* is hired to recover it. In no time at all, the simple-looking case has branched out like a cuttlefish. The bulldoggish old dowager (Florence Bates) who hired Marlowe unaccountably fires him. He stays on for the sake of her frightened secretary (Nancy Guild), who can't bear to be touched by a man but wants to get over her peculiarity. The detective also tangles with a gang of gamblers, a blackmailer, three corpses, the Los Angeles police force, and the old bulldog's unpleasant son (Conrad Janis). In the long run, he breaks the sinister hold Miss Bates has en Miss Guild, and takes an affectional full nelson on the young woman himself.

One of the main things that is intended to be exciting about this adaptation of Novelist Chandler's The High Window is the spectacle of a pretty girl learning, ever so shyly, how to enjoy being touched. Miss Guild has considerable prettiness and a kind of puppyish innocence in these scenes, but they are still somewhat embarrassing. Mr. Montgomery is a little too suave and petulant to be convincing as Marlowe. There are, however, some fair bursts of violence and some good sets.

These whodunit movies are fast running to formula, but the chances are that in at least two respects they will continue to be better than most movies: 1) in their portrayal of the shabby, menacing beauty of U.S. cities (there is a breath-taking street view of a Los Angeles rooming house in Doubloon) and 2) in the minor players who, with only a minute or so to make their points, impersonate, with passionate proficiency, the deep-sea fish of the underworld.

* Marlowe has been impersonated in other films by Dick Powell, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Montgomery.

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