The New Pictures

Key to the City (MGM) demonstrates that Clark Gable still cuts a manly figure in his underwear, still generates the tough, swaggering charm that made him a durable favorite of U.S. women moviegoers. To get Gable's clothes off and otherwise display his talents, M-G-M has slapped together a harum-scarum comedy that tries anything for a laugh, and sometimes succeeds. But the effort is more conspicuous than the fun.

As the strong-arm mayor of a luckily fictitious California city, Gable is an ex-longshoreman who keeps political scamps in line by dumping them into the fish pond in front of city hall. Loretta Young is a prissily elegant mayor from Maine. The two meet at a San Francisco mayors' convention, go through a honky-tonk brawl, two arrests, some smooching in the fog, and, finally, a joint triumph of love and two-fisted political virtue.

The wild nightclub fracas is good for some laughs, and Loretta gets a few more out of the climax by using judo to fling Bubble Dancer Marilyn Maxwell all over Mayor Gable's office. Unlike the able stars, most of the gags show their age.

The Hasty Heart (Warner) is so far off Hollywood's beaten track that its ad writers are frantically trying to represent it as the same old stuff. Warner, which offered Johnny Belinda as a gamy rape story and Treasure of Sierra Madre as a film in which "women sold their souls," now hints pretty broadly of something sexy in The Hasty Heart. Adapted from John Patrick's 1945 Broadway hit, the film deals with nothing spicier than the last days of a proud, lonely Scottish soldier who is dying in a British army hospital in Burma. What makes the picture good--and the advertising trick twice as shabby--is its success in recapturing the play's disarming mixture of tart humor and genuine pathos.

Sticking closely to the play, the action, except for a few opening shots, is pinned down to a group of thatched huts which serve as hospital wards; the story, which entails a good deal of talk, is penned in by the calculated artifice of theatrical form. The camera adds little more than the emphasis and searching intimacy of closeups. Yet a fine cast under Director Vincent Sherman gives a performance that should tie audiences into emotional knots. The picture's best job: a superlative portrayal by British Actor Richard Todd in his first major screen role.

As an aggressively misanthropic 24-year-old sergeant, and the dourest of Scots, Todd moves into a ward of recovering wounded and immediately gets the doting treatment of a popularity contest winner. What he does not know, and what his wardmates do know, is that he has only a few weeks to live. Hotly spurned and colorfully insulted, his fellow patients-- an American, an Australian, a New Zealander, an Englishman and an African Basuto--find their sympathy giving way to acute dislike.

But at the urging of a nurse who is determined that the Scot shall die among friends, they manage to thaw him out into the friendliest man in the place. When Todd learns that he has been befriended out of pity for his imminent death, he lapses into his old bitter pride, and it takes all of the script's doing to bring him around in time for a lighthearted but misty-eyed ending.

In its assault on the emotions, The Hasty Heart succeeds by never affronting the intelligence, never letting its sentiment spill over. Patricia Neal's controlled intensity suits the nurse's role well, and Ronald Reagan plays the Yank with the right brashness and sincerity.

Ultimately, the movie rests squarely on the characterization of the Scot. Complete with burr and kilt, fierce and tender by turns, full of brooding and bravura, the role is an actor's dream. Actor Todd makes it come true.

. . .

Slight, blue-eyed Richard Andrew Palethorpe-Todd, 30, is a pleasantly chatty Ulsterman with an easy English accent. The son of a British army major, he drifted into acting while hanging around the English stage to pick up pointers on writing a play. In Scotland before the war, he was a cofounder, part-time director and actor of the Dundee Repertory Company, where he once played in The Hasty Heart, not as the Scot ("I wouldn't have dared in Scotland") but as the American ("And I wouldn't try that part in America").

After war service as a parachutist in the Normandy invasion, the Battle of the Bulge and the sweep across Germany, Todd acted again in Dundee, then made his first film for a British company. That impressed Director Vincent Sherman, who won his reluctant consent to star in The Hasty Heart. Explains Todd: "I had too many ideals, I didn't realize then what films get away with."

Having made three more movies in England (one is Alfred Hitchcock's Stage-fright), he went to Hollywood a few weeks ago with his Scottish bride of six months. The screen's hottest "discovery" in many months, now working on another picture for Warner (Lightning Strikes Twice), Todd is still somewhat dazed by the studio's Academy Award aspirations for his performance.

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