The New Pictures

Adventure in Baltimore (RKO Radio), like a leisurely look into the family album, is good for some drowsy amusement and one or two chuckles. Set in the 1900s, it describes the misadventures of a rebellious young woman (Shirley Temple) who believes in women's rights--especially the right to vote and to paint the nude human figure. Expelled from school for her outlandishly radical notions, Shirley returns home to disgrace her kindly clergyman-father (Robert Young), outrage her boy friend (John Agar), and throw the whole neighborhood into an uproar.

As a firebrand in full petticoats, Cinemactress Temple works hard, but barely manages to keep up with the slow-paced antics. Fortunately, Veteran Robert Young is on hand to hold things together. His easygoing performance gives Adventure most of its warmth and conviction.

The Set-Up (RKO Radio) is a tough little film about small-time prize fighters with big-time dreams, and the racketeers who make & break them. Into normal screening time, it crams 80 climactic minutes of the career of Heavyweight "Stoker" Thompson (Robert Ryan). At 35, Stoker needs only a couple of stiff jolts to the head to become a punch-drunk derelict. Unwittingly, he saves himself by refusing to throw a fight. When local racketeers have finished teaching him a lesson, Stoker's right fist is a broken mess and his fight career is ended once & for all. To his wife (Audrey Totter), it is a happy ending.

No Champion when it comes to realistic boxing scenes (TIME, April 11), Set-Up packs its own sharp, unexpected punches. The story, based on a poem by Joseph Moncure March, is fresh and honest. Its script, tense as a taut rope, neatly sidesteps the tintyped heroics of standard fight films and concentrates on the rotten underside of the ring and the characters that infest it. Especially pungent is the treatment of Paradise City, a typical overnight stop on the hayseed circuit. Rooting about in this neon-lighted netherworld--in down-at-heel bars, penny arcades, a ramshackle arena and its sweaty lockerroom--the camera turns up an arresting assortment of local plug-uglies. Some of the character sketches are deftly sardonic; others--notably of ringside sadists--are heavily overdrawn.

Set-Up gets much of its surface glitter and look of reality from exciting camera work and lively invention. For its emotional drive, it relies almost entirely on the quiet, slowly accumulating honesty of Ryan's performance.

El Paso (Paramount) is a morally cross-eyed western about a young Eastern lawyer (John Payne) who has trouble telling right from wrong. Payne, just back from the Civil War, arrives in El Paso in search of his sweetheart (Gail Russell) and finds the town in the grip of violence and disorder. Landgrabber Sterling Hayden and his corrupt stooge, Sheriff Dick Foran, have the townspeople terrified. At first Payne tries unsuccessfully to unseat the villains by due process of law. Then he takes to rabble-rousing. Meanwhile, he begins to wonder if the end (civic order) justifies the means (taking the law into his own hands). Before finally arriving at the right answer, Payne and his vigilante friends string up a number of their enemies to nearby trees.

For all its fast riding and hard shooting, El Paso leaves a mildly unpleasant aftertaste. Its muddled moralizing on civil rights, sandwiched into its brutal, juicily detailed lynchings, makes an unappetizing dish. By contrast, the Cinecolor is fairly sweet and clean.

Outpost in Morocco (United Artists) is an unlikely yarn, in a desert setting, about some fussin' and feudin' between the French Foreign Legion and the Arabs. Its hero is Legionnaire George Raft, a man with an eye for Arab beauty, who falls in love with the Paris-bred daughter (Marie Windsor) of a rebel chieftain. He is finally obliged, pour la patrie, to dynamite her to kingdom come, along with a large group of her compatriots. Outpost's most dramatic feature: some authentic shots of the Atlas Mountains in French Morocco.

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