The New Pictures

A Ticket to Tomahawk (20th Century-Fox) takes the makings of a western railroading epic and turns them into one of the season's brightest comedies. Filmed in the mountains of Colorado, but taking only the most mischievous view of what may actually have happened there in 1876, the Technicolored movie recounts the adventures of a narrow-gauge ten-wheeler on its first run into the Rockies.

To fulfill its contract, the railroad must get a train into Tomahawk by an agreed deadline with at least one paying passenger on board. The run starts against some obstacles: hostile Indians, a stagecoach tycoon bent on thwarting the railroad, and the dispiriting fact that the road has run out of track in the 40-mile stretch between Epitaph and Dead Horse Point. With one reluctant paying passenger (Dan Dailey) firmly tied to the locomotive, a caravan headed by a sharpshooting lady peace officer (Anne Baxter) sets out to haul the engine by mule to the point where the track begins again. Among those along for the ride: Madame Adelaide and her dance-hall girls (who can dance).

The trip spells double jeopardy for Dailey, a traveling salesman of mustache cups and the Saturday Evening Post, because Anne suspects him of villainy. Equally deadly with knife and gun, she is completely ignorant about men. Always at her side (by her grandfather's arranging) is a trusty, hatchet-bearing Indian sworn to keep her that way. Before the picture winds up in a sequence of skillfully pyramided gags, Dailey proves himself both a hero and a willing instructor in bussing--and, as moviegoers already know, an engaging song & dance man.

Excellent performances by Dailey and Anne Baxter, as well as a supporting cast that includes Walter Brennan and Connie Gilchrist, bring out all the fun in a deft script by Mary Loos and Richard Sale (When Willie Comes Marching Home).

In his first directing assignment for Fox, Scripter Sale gives Hollywood one more good argument for letting an able writer put his own work before the camera.

D. O. A. (Harry Popkln; United Artists) is a tricky quickie that takes its title from the standard police abbreviation meaning "dead on arrival." Its hero (Edmond O'Brien) wakes up one morning to find himself inexplicably dying of poison. In the few days before the poison takes its final effect, he rushes about to find his murderer. Nothing about his hunt through a crowded gallery of suspects is nearly as intriguing as the idea that motivates it. Though much of the film has been shot against teeming backgrounds in San Francisco and Los Angeles, D. 0. A. illustrates that nothing is much help to second-rate actors trying to find their way through a Confusing script.

No Sad Songs for Me (Columbia). What does a happy wife & mother do when she learns that she has cancer and only ten months to live? Having made so bold as to put the problem forthrightly on the screen for the first time (while keeping it out of the film's advertising campaign), Columbia Pictures has been cautious enough to make the story's characters behave as little as possible like human beings.

When Margaret Sullavan wrests the unsuspected diagnosis from her doctor, she persuades him not to let it get any farther. She tells neither her child (Natalie Wood) nor her husband (Wendell Corey), though his work on a pressing engineering project will keep them apart most of the time for months. Instead, she decides to proceed on the conviction that life, if short, can be beautiful.

She goes along with cheerful morbidity, gives most of her clothes to charity, orders Christmas poinsettias when her friends are buying seeds for next spring's flowers, flinches delicately at a "Happy New Year" greeting, enjoys such private jokes as her own inadvertent remark: "Over my dead body." She starts encouraging her small daughter to do things for herself.

Still her nobility awaits its greatest trial. Husband Corey, who is pretty noble himself, is beginning to make eyes at his new drafting assistant, a lush, dark-haired Swede (Viveca Lindfors). For a moment, when it seems that he will run off with Viveca, Margaret decides on suicide rather than giving up her secret. But her speeding car runs out of gas before it reaches the cliff. Then Corey turns up to assure her that he loves her more than Viveca, who is nobly leaving town. All that remains for doomed Margaret to do is to persuade the other woman to stick around; after all, the husband and child will soon be needing another wife & mother.

No Sad Songs treats this sudsy claptrap with considerable skill and restraint. It gives the least possible offense to squeamish moviegoers; as far as appearances go, the heroine might be suffering from nothing more serious than migraine. Admirers of Actress Sullavan's mannered, laryngitic style will see and hear plenty of her, though unmannered Actor Corey gives much the best performance in the picture. If the film does nothing else, it will probably drive many a woman to her doctor for a complete checkup.

No Man of Her Own (Paramount) is an uneven mixture of effective thriller, bathos, and the kind of melodramatics that calls on an audience to hiss the villain. In Broadway Actor Lyle Bettger, a vain-looking blond with a built-in sneer, the movie also offers a likely candidate for the most hissable heavy since Erich von Stroheim.

Bettger plays the father of unwed Barbara Stanwyck's unborn child. He brushes her off with a $5 bill and a one-way ticket home. She escapes death in a train wreck, assumes the identity of a dead fellow traveler, a pregnant mother on the way to live with in-laws who have never seen her. The trusting in-laws (Jane Cowl and Henry O'Neill) take Barbara and her baby to their bosom. Their son (John Lund)--the brother of Barbara's supposed husband, who died in the wreck--suspects her deception but falls too hard in love with her to care. Then Bettger turns up to blackmail her.

Though its overripe plot is unconvincing and full of coincidence, the movie delivers good performances, especially bv Actresses Cowl and Stanwyck and Villain Bettger.

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