The New Pictures

Black Hand (MGM) is a minor triumph of production over plot. A slow, overlong melodrama about the bomb-throwing extortionists who terrorized Manhattan's Little Italy around the turn of the century, the story is so familiar that it might be a rehearsal for a movie about gangsters of a later era. But the film's vivid sets, new faces and, most of all, richly atmospheric photography help to give it a fresh look.

Filmed in sharp contrasts of shadow and brightness, Black Hand evokes its period and locale with shabby, tin-ceilinged tenement flats and narrow streets swarming with immigrant life. With considerable effect, it conveys the ruthlessness of the Black Hand gang, the fear of the victims and the helplessness of police in whom no one dares to confide.

The mood proves strong enough to survive the story, though at times it almost flickers away. A young Italian immigrant (Gene Kelly) sets out to avenge his father, who was murdered by the gang for trying to report an extortion threat. Persuaded to organize the browbeaten community into resistance, Kelly is flung by the hoodlums into the first mass meeting, battered, bleeding and almost dead. Then he hits on the more cautious idea of sending a veteran Italian-American detective (J. Carrol Naish) to Italy to dig up criminal records that will enable the U.S. to deport its immigrant thugs.

The idea eventually pays off in a blaze of heroics and dynamite. But not until Kelly has gotten himself out of a picturesque Black Hand cell: a butcher's icebox where piles of homemade bombs nestle among the sides of beef.

Ruthless pruning might have made Black Hand taut and incisive enough to deserve the loving care with which it was put together. As it is, the picture flares occasionally into what it might have been, e.g., a courtroom scene in which a crucial witness falters under a small gesture from the spectators' rows. Dancer Kelly proves capable in a straight role and gets the support of a good cast. As the frustrated detective who has spent 20 years fighting the gang, Actor Naish polishes off a gem of a scene as he drunkenly celebrates his first victorious skirmish.

Mother Don't Tell Me (20th Century-Fox) is a comic elaboration of one of the hard facts of medicine: it's tough to be a doctor's wife. In milking it for laughs, Scripter-Director Claude Binyon manipulates the fact into arrant Hollywood fiction, and too often forces the comedy into farce. But thanks mostly to an ingratiating performance by Dorothy McGuire, the movie passes the time pleasantly.

In a role only once removed from Claudia, Actress McGuire plays a hopeless romantic who fastens on an earnest young doctor (William Lundigan) and plots an ideal marriage, complete with fireside evenings together. The courtship is punctuated with emergency calls, the wedding is almost interrupted by the telephone, and the honeymoon just happens to dovetail with a medical convention ("How," asks the bride, "did you choose Detroit?"). Dorothy soon finds that she can share her husband's work even less than his time. In the first flush of pregnancy, she is appalled to learn that he passes off her symptoms with the same professional detachment with which he keeps her dinners waiting. Having reconciled herself at last to a life of affectionate neglect, she has to start coping with the most fabricated part of the picture's plot: a scheme by her mother-in-law to have Dr. Lundigan wooed away by a pretty young medical associate. The heroine saves her marriage, but not as convincingly as Actress McGuire saves the picture.

Francis (Universal-International) is the name of a talented Army mule (already celebrated in David Stern's 1946 comic novel) who not only talks but makes more sense than the whole chain of command. By confiding Japanese secrets to a bewildered Burma campaign shavetail (Donald O'Connor), Francis throws the enemy for a loss and the U.S. brass into a tizzy.

When Lieut. O'Connor bags a Japanese observation post on information supplied by the mule, his colonel (Ray Collins) treats him like a hero. When he tries to share the credit with Francis, he is put to weaving baskets in the neuropsychiatric ward. Released, O'Connor goes on heroically fighting the one-mule war; as his coups get bigger, so do the baskets.

Francis, who could have settled the Army psychiatrists' problem with a few words, lets them stew in their conferences, finally speaks up to a three-star general (John McIntire). After resuming his silence long enough to cast doubt on the general's sanity, the mule tells off a roomful of war correspondents and wins his own hero's reward.

Too leaden for fantasy, the movie is mulishly slow, and so prone to linger on the obvious that for a while it barely makes the grade as comedy. Not content to have Francis show up his military superiors, Author-Scripter Stern lets the mule go on haranguing them as well. But in its best scenes, the picture kicks up enough fun to numb a tolerant moviegoer to its shortcomings. Actor O'Connor makes an amiable nitwit, and Francis (voice by horse opera's Chill Wills) is a tribute to the patience and technical skill of moviemaking.

Francis is played by a real Army veteran who underwent a 16-hour-a-day movie course with studio Trainer Jimmy Phillips. Recruited for the film from a Calabasas, Calif, mule dealer, he was dyed a darker hue from head to hoof, wore greasepaint on his mouth, powder on his nose, a "rat" in his tail, half-inch false eyelashes and--until he balked--extra-sized false ears. Like many a new-found star, patient Francis is currently making personal appearances with the picture.

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