The New Pictures

Always Leave Them Laughing (Warner) is a schmalzy backstage film that has been knowingly tailored to Milton Berle's measure. Previous movies in which TV's favorite entertainer has appeared not only robbed him of his special brand of comedy but left most of Berle on the cutting-room floor. This attractively bedraggled production allows the Berle style full rein, for better or worse. As a result, Berle comes through as a powerfully unkempt personality--the prototype of the life-of-every-party.

Suggesting a left-handed biography of Berle himself, the story catalogues the rise to television fame of a comic who specializes in gag-stealing and belligerent self-interest, and stops at nothing to keep an audience laughing. The movie includes an endless parade of vaudeville turns with Berle running through his television repertory, throwing in some slapdash imitations of Ted Lewis, Al Jolson, Bert Lahr, et al. Though most of the skits are single-set affairs shot by a rigid camera, there is nothing static about the movie. Berle's heavy cavortings energize the screen like a buffalo stampede. The fact that his comedy is so desperately anxious to please and so hit-or-miss in its shotgun methods adds a human element that is rare in modern-day comedy.

Roy Del Ruth's old-style direction, in the manner of a fast silent comedy, and Ruth Roman's homegirl charm as the love interest, help Berle make Always Leave Them Laughing a warm, unpretentiously funny comedy.

Tension (MGM) details the violent domestic problems of a Los Angeles druggist (Richard Basehart) and his cheating wife (Audrey Totter). Tormented by her weakness for hanging around the store and picking up his customers, the druggist elaborately plots the death of a salesman who finally carries her off.

Slackly written and strewn with loose ends, the melodrama is robbed of much of its inherent tension by overacting. But it has a variety of unpretentious and believable sets (notably those around its drugstore corner) put together by someone who knew sidestreet architecture and atmosphere. By even so modest a merit--and by trying to be nothing more than the slight time killer it is--Tension manages to be more entertaining than some of Hollywood's grander products.

All the King's Men (Columbia), a movie version of Robert Penn Warren's 1947 Pulitzer Prizewinning novel, is a tabloid view of a power-mad politician who has set his heart on bossing the world. The best of recent Hollywood attempts to fuse studio and documentary styles, this slam-bang indictment of grass-roots demagoguery is full of punch and color: melodramatic shots of campaign barbecues, torchlight parades, legislative brawling and backroom political deals.

The central character, a backwoods idealist who becomes a one-man state government, is hard-centered, soft-surfaced Willie Stark (Broderick Crawford). His life story is told in choppy, dramatic incidents, which give the movie a curious pattern--Stark at the football stadium, Stark haranguing a fairgrounds crowd, Stark bulldozing the legislators, Stark posing for cameramen with his estranged family. The small, disconnected scenes hit the eye with the repetitive impact of telephone poles seen from a fast train, and din the main character deep into the mind.

The scriptwriting catches so much of the vitality and fire of rabble-rousing politics, it is a pity that it also uses some too-familiar materials. When a henchman gets out of line, Stark's actions recall a dozen gangster movies: backed by a tiny, shifty-faced gunman, he props his feet on the table, snarls from the side of his mouth and turns his victim into quaking jelly; filled with lead from an assassin's revolver, Stark babbles improbable curtain lines that too carefully-dear up any audience doubt as to his power-mad aims.

Scripter-Director-Producer Robert Rossen's efforts to keep Stark from being a facsimile of the late Huey Long often turn the character into a colorless man who lacks the political charm of a people's favorite and looks like a cross between a schoolteacher and a gangster. But when Actor Crawford is allowed to swing around in the role, he has some fine scenes--notably, the seedy politico resting off a nightlong drunk in a playground swing, gesturing the children to go off and leave him alone.

The newfangled techniques which Director Rossen seems to have borrowed from the modern Italian directors have given the movie vitality and power. Since it was shot outdoors in all sorts of weather, the film credibly suggests the passing of time simply because no two scenes show the same sky or lighting. The camera, often threading through Stark's career like a fond mamma looking for her child in a crowd, turns up all kinds of unpredictable and realistic touches. Occasionally, Director Rossen plunges spiritedly into a scene as though, in the Rossellini manner, he were making up the script as he went along.

Interesting acting job: Mercedes Mc-Cambridge, as Stark's hard-boiled assistant, puts a snarl and growl into her radio-trained voice, spreading a small bonfire through her scenes and stealing them all.

To get away from Hollywood's familiar faces, Scripter-Director-Producer Robert Rossen filmed most of his picture in Stockton, Calif, (pop. 66,000), casting townsfolk in all but the principal roles. He used a railroad brakeman as Pa Stark, the city's sheriff as the sheriff, a local preacher as the preacher. In the big crowd scene just before Willie Stark's assassination, he turned four cameras loose at once on Stockton's non-professional extras to get their unrehearsed reactions to Crawford's speech.

Moviemaker Rossen, a short, chunky man of 41, is also expert at a harsher realism: the art of getting your own way in Hollywood. By combining talent with a tough-mindedness born of his rough & tumble boyhood on Manhattan streets, Rossen has won the scenaristis goal of controlling his own picture right through to the final editing.

An unsuccessful playwright on Broadway, he joined Warner Brothers as a scripter in 1936, piled up plenty of screen credits (They Won't Forget, Dust Be My Destiny, Edge of Darkness) but not much satisfaction. In 1946 he branched out as a writer-director (Johnny 0'Clock), then tried just directing (Body and Soul). Next, having set up Robert Rossen Productions through a financing-distributing deal with Columbia, he became a producer (The Undercover Man). His latest film is his first crack at writing, producing and directing all at once.

Though he still thinks of himself as a writer, Rossen has begun to encounter the curse of bigness. With four pictures now on his producing schedule, he will not find time--even in his arduous six-day week--to write and direct more than two of them.

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