The New Pictures

Mr. Imperium (M-G-M), Ezio (South Pacific) Pinza's first movie, was shelved until his second, Strictly Dishonorable, could introduce him to the screen (TIME, July 23). Now moviegoers can see why. The film shackles Pinza and Lana Turner to the story of an incognito King's fling with a nightclub cutie from the U.S.--a situation enfeebled by long service in Ruritanian farce and operetta. Basso Pinza sings three numbers predictably well; Actress Turner sings a couple predictably. But only the Technicolor looks good in Mr. Imperium.

The Magic Face (Columbia) will come as news to Allied veterans who still think they liberated Europe in World War II by defeating the Germans. The real cause of Germany's defeat, it now appears, is that Hitler wasn't Hitler any more; he was really Janus the Great (Luther Adler), a professional impersonator bent on destroying the Reich by making all the wrong military decisions.

As the movie has it, Hitler erred not in war but only in love, when he moved in on Adler's blonde wife (Patricia Knight) and conveniently committed Adler to prison. Hitler failed to reckon with a vengeful zeal and a talent for impersonation that enabled Adler to move painstakingly up the Nazi social ladder in the successive roles of the prison warden, Hitler's valet, and finally the Fuehrer himself.

The film dresses up its theory with Viennese locations, a commentary by radio's William L. (Berlin Diary) Shirer, and newsreel inserts designed to make

Adler's skulduggery and Germany's setbacks look like cause & effect. Since he also plays the real Hitler, Actor Adler* makes the impersonations look plausible; he shows his versatility in brief imitations of Mussolini, Haile Selassie and Chamberlain. But The Magic Face, full of logical kinks and lurid banalities, hangs together no better as fiction than fact.

The Man With a Cloak (MGM) is a slow but tolerable melodrama, set in 1848 Manhattan, about a velvet-gloved struggle between good & evil forces for the wealth of a dying reprobate (Louis Calhern). Leslie (An American in Paris) Caron, playing a sweet young thing sent from Paris by the old man's grandson, wants the money for the cause of the French Republic. His calculating housekeeper-mistress (Barbara Stanwyck) wants him to die in a hurry while she is still favored in his will.

Into this struggle steps a mysterious stranger (Joseph Gotten), courtly, penniless and alcoholic, a poet whose identity the film discloses at the fadeout. The good French girl and the evil housekeeper are rivals for his help, and he seems to waver between them. When Calhern dies, only Gotten has a clue to the whereabouts of a new will and the imagination to track it down.

The Man With a Cloak comes equipped vith engaging accessories: talented players, notably Actor Calhern, bright spots of drawing-room dialogue and the atmosphere of a period and locale seldom pictured on the screen. While distinguishing the movie from run-of-the-melodrama, these virtues do not quite offset the slackness and familiarity of its plot.

A Millionaire for Christy (Thor Productions; 20th Century-Fox) falls, with a resounding thud, under the heading of madcap romantic farce. Heroine Christy (Eleanor Parker), a fortune-hunting legal secretary charged with telling a client (Fred MacMurray) that he has inherited $2,000,000, decides to make a favorable impression on the heir apparent before spilling the good news. She impresses him as a lunatic, disrupts his wedding, woos him in a boxcar, wins him with the connivance of a poor but dishonest psychiatrist (Richard Carlson). By the time MacMurray is convinced that the inheritance is actually his, the money has flown. His problem, and an interminably coy movie, could have been mercifully forestalled by a phone call in the first reel.

*Whose father, the late Jacob Adler, was a pillar of the Yiddish theater.

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